This season’s visit to Everton is on Monday night with an 8pm kick off, thanks to our very good friends at Sky Sports. You’ll find the shiny new Hill Dickinson Stadium about a mile and a half to the north of Liverpool City centre.

If you’re driving, I can’t recommend that you try to get all the way to the stadium by car, due to the road closures around the stadium and limited parking options nearby. The council have introduced ‘Football Match Parking Zones’ in the surrounding areas, and no doubt there will be an army of traffic wardens ready to ticket any non-residents found to be parking in those streets.

The official Everton website recommends that you park in the city centre, or in the multi-storey in Vermont Way in Bootle, L20 4XZ. From there you can catch a Merseyrail train, which runs every 15 minutes from nearby Bootle New Strand station to Sandhills, the nearest station to the stadium. On the way back you would be looking for a train to Southport.

Sandhills is a 10-to-15-minute walk from the stadium, and from Liverpool Central you can get there on a train heading to any one of Southport, Ormskirk or Headbolt Lane. As all lines have a train every 15 minutes that means your average wait time will be only 5 minutes. Since the stadium opened the station has sprouted a new footbridge to give a second exit on matchdays, and a new holding area outside to help with the queues after the game.

Despite the frequent service, the wait for a train afterwards can be quite long, so a lot of fans opt to walk back into the city centre. But at the time of writing the weather forecast for Monday evening is for possible sleet, so good luck with that! To get back to Leeds by train you need to make it to Lime Street for the 22.53 or 23.30 to Manchester Victoria, changing there to get back to Leeds in the small hours.

There aren’t many pubs near the stadium, apart from the one just the other side of the road, which is for home fans only. In truth, there isn’t much in the way of facilities anywhere close to the stadium at the moment, as it’s in the middle of a former dockside area whose redevelopment has only just begun.

The best bet is to do your drinking in the city centre close to Moorfields or Central railway stations, before getting the train to Sandhills. The official Everton website promises that “a range of beers, cider and pre-packaged alcohol” will be available inside the stadium, but warns that “the sale of alcohol can be suspended at any time, as advised by Merseyside Police”.

Everton first started to plan for a move from Goodison as long ago as 1996, when it was becoming clear that the old ground wouldn’t meet the needs of the 21st century, and that it’s capacity of under 40,000 would restrict their income and thus their ability to compete with the big boys.

They looked at the possibility of moving outside the city to Kirkby, and then to a new Stanley Park stadium they could share with Liverpool, before finally settling on Bramley-Moore dock as their choice of site. The club had to arrange loans of £280m from the city council and £220m from private sources, before construction finally began in July 2021.

To help to pay for it all, they sold the naming rights to local legal firm Hill Dickinson for £10m a year, as well as earning additional revenue from other events, including Rugby League matches. Their official website describes the stadium as “a brand-new world-class venue built for more than just football. This iconic space at Bramley-Moore Dock brings together modern design and local heritage to create an unforgettable backdrop for events of all kinds”.

The total capacity is 52,888, and the away section is in the north-east corner, the closest part to the city centre. As we would expect from a new ‘state of the art’ stadium, every seat has a clear view of the pitch, and there is plenty of space on the concourse. And the ‘footy scran’ website speaks highly of the food options, especially the Korean chicken bowl!

Our allocation is 3,001 tickets, at a cost of £30 for adults, £25 for seniors (66 plus) and £20 for the under 18s, and they have of course sold out. There seem to be a few tickets left in the home areas of the stadium, but won’t have much luck trying to get one, as they are only on sale to Everton members.

The stadium has been designed so it’s capacity can be increased by a further 10,000 if need be, which could happen now that they’ve freed themselves from their annual relegation dogfight. They are one of the host venues for at Euro 2028, and like us, they have a long season ticket waiting list, so it looks like the demand is there.

Some of this stuff came from www.footballgroundguide.com.

Tim Whelan