How to complete a relegation great-escape – by those who have done it

“I remember the warm-up. I looked up to Dave Watson so much as one of the best captains I ever had and a great leader, and I remember asking him how he felt and he just said ‘drained’. When he said that I thought ‘we are in trouble here’. Luckily we stuck together.

“Because we had been hammered the week before we probably didn’t think we could recover. But there was that responsibility for everyone else at the club, the people behind the scenes, Evertonians who had been there for years and it meant so much to them. Players come and go. You might get a cut in your wages but you still have a job.”

Everton went 1-0 up in the first-half through Gareth Farrelly – a rare goal and even rarer as the midfielder struck it with his weaker right-foot – but then Nick Barmby missed a penalty and the tension grew.

“I remember taking two touches after the ball came to me and Dave Watson said to me ‘hey lad, one touch only!’ I had never felt so nervous going into a game,” Short said.

“Then after we missed the penalty they went down the other end and scored. It was just panic after that. It was desperate, desperate times but it was like winning the Champions League when we held on.

“I loved my time at Everton and I absolutely did not want to be associated with taking such a great club down. The scenes at the end… it was just relief. I remember Howard [Kendall, who was then sacked] just crying in the dressing room afterwards.”

It was made all the more dramatic because the players were aware of what was happening at Stamford Bridge. “The fans drove us over the line in the end,” Short said. “They got us through that day. Goodison is an intimidating place to go, the fans are so incredibly passionate and I am sure they will get them through again. It would be devastating to see them go down, it really would.

“We knew Chelsea had scored. You hear the fans and the message came on from the dugout. I was on the far side but Dave Watson told me. It gave us something to hang on to.”

There was a twist however with Short, now 54 and the assistant manager at Oxford United, revealing Bolton should have stayed up anyway.

“If goal-line technology had existed we would have been down as we played them in September, the first game at the Reebok, and it was 0-0,” Short said. “But there was a corner and I was marking Gerry Taggart and he beat me in the air. It hit the crossbar and went over the line by a couple of feet. Terry Phelan was on the post and hooked it clear and it was ‘play on’. We got a point and without that we would have been relegated.”