Everton got a result against Aston Villa on Saturday, a 1-1- tie, their first point in the Premier League since Landon Donovan rejoined the Liverpool-based team on loan from the Galaxy, and when it was over David Moyes, the Everton coach, was calmly direct about identifying his most influential player.

It was Donovan, the Galaxy captain, who made the pass that set up Victor Anichebe with the tying goal, and Moyes noticed.

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I have witnesses to this. Two days before the New Orleans Saints — and the quarterback who enjoyed the most productive season in NFL history — played in San Francisco, I was warning a couple of NFL fans here in Abu Dhabi about Candlestick Park.

I have spent many days in Candlestick, particularly in the 1990s (when the Niners were in the playoffs all the time and the Rams and Raiders weren’t, and SF was a one-day up-and-back road trip from SoCal), and almost all of those days were profoundly unpleasant.

I was telling that to these two guys at the Thirty-First Floor Bar at the Abu Dhabi Holiday Inn (far nicer than it sounds) more than 48 hours before kickoff. “Beware The Stick …”

The Saints are a dome team, and bad things tend to happen to dome teams when they venture outdoors.

And Candlestick is a peculiar form of “outdoors”. Not dependably frozen, this time of year, like Green Bay or Chicago might be. Not potentially mild like Los Angeles or Tampa.

Candlestick is one of the roughest places to play in the NFL. It’s a massive pain just to get there, and a bigger one to sit there. Trust me on this. I can talk about it at length with minimal research. And Saints fans now can talk all about it — if they watched their team turn over the ball five times and lose to the 49ers in the NFL divisional playoffs.

Here is what you can expect at The Stick:

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I thought the noise was unbearable in that moment in time when beepers ruled the land, 20-some years ago.

They would go off in a press conference, and everyone but the perpetrator would be looking around, staring daggers at the idiot who had forgotten to turn off his beeper, which was now squawking.

Now, of course, it is worse. That’s progress for you.

But we have a story here of someone who was truly and deeply humiliated to be the source of the noise pollution, and I appreciate that.

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I was a history major in college before I opened the door to the offices of the student newspaper, in my fourth year of school, and that was that.

Had I not gone into journalism (and it is hard to imagine I wasn’t going to end up there), I would have tried to make history a career. Somehow. Teaching it, maybe? Writing it?

As it turns out, I’ve been a sort of sports historian all along, preoccupied with records, interested in rises and falls of coaches and organizations, prone to spend an hour or two with microfilm to write about an event from 1925, searching for the last surviving member of some long-ago team.

Perhaps it was limiting myself … well, absolutely, it was … but a part of me had decided I would be the sports historian to California’s largest and most bizarre county, and before I was gone all the interesting bits of it would be on record. Somewhere.

Luckily for me, I was booted out of SoCal journalism about 10 years short of finishing The History of Local Sports” … and since then I’ve done gigs in Hong Kong and the UAE, and now I’m not sure I ever will return to the U.S. permanently.

Which is a long preamble to noting that a kid I covered as an athlete has been chosen to coach a prominent high school in my former stamping grounds.

Meaning, the new “Coach Fazio.”

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The United Arab Emirates is a distant doppelganger to Southern California, when it comes to cars. They love their wheels here. Love them. Mass transit here is buses. Not a rail line in the country, that I know of, though the government apparently is considering a high-speed rail link between the country’s major coastal cities. So, cars a necessity as well as a pleasure.

But in two-plus years here, I have yet to have a formal relationship with a car. Or truck. Or SUV, and SUVs are more common here even than in SoCal, in part because they can be taken off the road and into the undeveloped part of the desert for what is indelicately known as “dune bashing.”

Not long after we arrived, October of 2009, a guy we worked with declared that he was a big proponent of private vehicles. “It will change your life,” he said.

Here we are, 27 months later, and I haven’t gone in yet for the life-changing experience.

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I’ve written fairly often about Diego Maradona. I know that. Almost unavoidable. El Diego coaches the Al Wasl team up in Dubai, and I cover a lot of domestic soccer/football here in the UAE. So Diego comes up a lot.

We are trying to find the latest answer to the great sports question: How rare is it for a great player to be a competent coach? It seems as if it is rare, indeed, and Maradona is doing nothing to buck the trend. I have decided that he is a kick-ass celebrity — but a lousy coach. So far, anyway.

Today, I drove the 100-plus miles to Al Ain to see a President’s Cup match involving Maradona’s Wasl team and Al Wahda, an Abu Dhabi club. Al Ain being a neutral site.

I had framed this match, in the morning paper, as a last chance for Maradona’s club to get within shouting distance of a major trophy in his first season here.

What happened?

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How many of the readers of this blog think “Securities and Exchange Commision” when they see SEC? Yeah, I figure “zero” too.

Anyway, the SEC got its all-Southeastern Conference (imagine the first E in Southeastern is capitalized) BCS championship football game … and we got a horrifically dull event.

Can we agree on this? When two teams from the same conference have played in the regular season … they should never, ever be allowed to meet in the BCS championship game. Forget that neither team scored a touchdown when LSU beat Alabama 9-6 in the regular season. A rematch should not be allowed if they played a 28-27 game.

What should have happened, instead?

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It was about 5 a.m. at this end of the Arabian Peninsula when Tim Tebow hooked up with Demaryius Thomas on the 80-yard scoring pass on the first play of overtime, beating the Pittsburgh Steelers 29-23 in the playoffs.

By the time I got to the offices of The National later in the morning, something odd was happening.

People were talking about Tim Tebow. And not just the Americans.

Such is the Legend of Tim Tebow that he prompts conversation, speculation and cogitation some 8,000 miles from Denver. In a country where even most of the Westerners know little or nothing about “American football.”

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Getting old. It isn’t all bad news. Mostly, it is. Sure. But not entirely. Past a certain threshold you get breaks on tickets at museums and concerts, etc., and you can collect Social Security, in the U.S., if the system hasn’t yet gone bankrupt.

Another significant advantage pops up on the “literature” side of things.

To wit: You’ve been around so long that you can read a good book again … and it’s like it’s new!

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Well, 6.6 pounds lighter, to be exact. And it didn’t involve violent illness or amputation.

You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I weigh myself fairly regularly. Not that any of us really need to do that. Because if the clothes that used to fit don’t fit anymore … we’ve lost weight. Or, far more likely, gained it.

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