Summer 2023 was not where I expected my thoughts to turn this week. But while Everton have been busy below the surface, the hard work of the transfer window is yet to lead to an incoming and so I have had more time to look elsewhere than in a normal week.

The win over Tottenham Hotspur has also helped - isn’t life so much easier after three points? In two and a half years covering the Blues, I’ve not had as many of those to carry me between fixtures as I would have liked.

Anyway, in the absence of the new signings I think we all - club chiefs included - recognise would be useful right now, two transfers elsewhere caught my attention.

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The first was a bit of a surprise, as Isaac Price joined West Bromwich Albion after an 18 month stint in Belgium. The second had been trailed for most of this month, with Tom Cannon finally completing his move to Sheffield United on Thursday.

That’s two Everton academy graduates, youngsters who rose through the ranks at Finch Farm and eventually touched upon the senior team, now set to lead their new clubs through the drama of a promotion push to the Premier League.

I’m delighted for both players. Together, with the likes of Lewis Warrington - who has also moved this week, joining Salford United on loan from Leyton Orient - and Stanley Mills, who scored for Everton Under-21s on his return last week after a year out with injury, they were part of an U21s cohort that had a lot of promise.

Mills, Price and Cannon all joined up with the senior squad in November 2022 as Frank Lampard took what was left of his side to Australia during the World Cup break.

For all the tumult that soon followed that trip, and for all that the start of Lampard’s fall can be traced to the Bournemouth double header just before it, there still felt reason to be optimistic as Boscombe Beach was swapped for Bondi and Lampard plotted for a January transfer window during which he believed he would be able to strengthen. If only we knew then what we knew now.

Anyway, I spoke to Mills, Price and Cannon while out there and you could sense their excitement and hope for the future. Under Lampard, who gave all three (and Warrington) first team debuts, I felt they might have had a chance if things went right at Everton in the new year. Maybe not of becoming regulars, but perhaps of getting regular cameos through which they could grow in confidence and we could gauge their development away from the intensity of a survival fight.

That feeling held a few weeks later, when Australia felt a distant dream as I travelled cross-country to Lincoln City to watch the U21s in the EFL Trophy. That was the coldest I’ve been at a football match and Everton lost, but the way they challenged senior opposition only boosted my hopes for the team. Cannon’s goal in the 4-2 defeat, a brutal finish from the edge of the area when he had the audacity to shoot rather than run through on goal, remains one of my favourite strikes to have seen in person.

Of course, things did not go well for Everton. Christmas was marred by the home Boxing Day defeat to Wolverhampton Wanderers. By the end of January, Lampard was gone, Everton were condemned to another relegation battle and the club was engulfed in protest and a crisis of results, communication and leadership.

There have been many low points and difficult times over recent years and this was the toughest. It was only the beginning though, and for all that followed, the summer of 2023 was another rough time as Sean Dyche and Kevin Thelwell tried to build a side that could stay up against a backdrop of general financial uncertainty and regulatory catastrophe.

When Price departed for Standard Liege at the start of the summer it was a shame but not a surprise, with there being clear friction between his hopes for first team football and what he was likely to get at Everton under Dyche.

Cannon’s sale to Leicester City on the final day of the window felt like a gut punch though. This was a player too good for the Under-21s, who had shown at Preston North End in previous months that he was a good Championship striker and, in a squad that struggled for goals, having him on the periphery felt worthwhile.

Every supporter wants their club to be the one that offers a pathway from the academy into the first team. Everton, in a financial mess the extent of which was still unknown, and in Dyche being led by a pragmatist with no choice but to concentrate on the present, were not that club.

Given the size of the £7.5m package on offer for Cannon, in context it was a move that was probably good for all parties. That did not make it more palatable though and, for me, the exits of Everton’s starlets (including teenage defender Ishe Samuels-Smith and even Anthony Gordon months earlier) represented one of the worst examples of how the excess of the Farhad Moshiri years haunted the club through one of its most difficult periods.

The success of Price and Cannon and the new opportunities they have now been presented with is good and I struggle to think of anyone who will not wish them the best. Should they fire their respective sides into the top flight it will be easy to rue their departures. Such navel-gazing is pointless - Everton were not the club those talents needed them to be to give them a chance of breaking through, one there is no guarantee either would take.

But it feels poignant given other events of this week. On Tuesday night, the Under-18s once again lit up the FA Youth Cup under the lights of Goodison Park. For the chaos and constraints of recent years, Everton have built a promising squad at that level. While they have been unable to invest competitively at senior level, they have sought to strengthen their future with additions like Braiden Graham and Justin Clarke, who are complementing academy talents such as George Morgan, Douglass Lukjanciks and, most impressively, Harrison Armstrong.

There is, once again, a promising cohort of talent rising through the ranks at Finch Farm. With Everton through the worst of the regulatory issues and with the strength provided by The Friedkin Group’s takeover, there are plenty of reasons to hope for a brighter future for the club.

One of the first, and best, signs of that would be the stability to give some of those up and coming youngsters chances some of their predecessors were not quite able to exploit amid a period of turbulence on and off the pitch, when there was pressure to make every penny and every minute count towards the overriding goal of keeping the club in the Premier League, at any cost.