Let the games begin

The English Premier League kicks off its season tomorrow. Everton will be at home against Arsenal.
The specter of Manchester City will loom over this match. City, Manchester’s chronically under-performing second team, has been on a spending spree similar to that which, not long ago, made Chelsea into one of Europe’s top five clubs. As a result of the big name players City has been able to acquire this off-season, nearly everyone assumes that Sparky Hughes’s side will leapfrog Everton (last year’s fifth place team) and most think it will also surpass Arsenal (who finished fourth last year). Most of the debate centers around whether City will manage a top three finish, i.e. pass Liverpool, Chelsea, or Manchester United.
Arsenal and Everton both had players that City coveted this summer. Arsenal lost two such players – Kolo Toure, a world class central defender and Emmanuel Adebayor, a world class center forward.
Everton though has been able, thus far, to beat back City’s efforts to sign Joleon Lescott. But with City offering us more than 22 million Euros and offering Lescott double his current weekly wage, Hughes may still get his man. In the meantime, according to our manager David Moyes, City has “twisted” Lescott’s head.
They seem, at a minimum, to have gotten inside of Moyes’s. Our Davey reacted angrily when Hughes refused to take “no’ for an answer and announced he would take his case for the sale of Lescott over Moyes’s head to the “real powers” at Everton. Moyes had already described himself as “demented” that Everton has been unable to purchase a single player of note during the off-season. If we were to sell Lescott now, after Hughes publicly insulted our manager, it might mark the beginning of the end of Moyes’s time on Merseyside.
But now it’s time for the mind-games to recede and the real games to begin.
UPDATE: Then again, maybe we should not have let the games begin. Arsenal dismantled Everton 6-1. If David Moyes felt “demented” before today, imagine how he feels now.