Everton, and existence versus living

Sean Dyche leaves Goodison Park having sucked the remaining life out of an already pallid Everton team. Will it really be Moyes to the Future, to take them to their new stadium?

New year, new beginnings, then. That Everton decided to pull the plug on Sean Dyche was simultaneously something of an eyebrow-raiser and no great surprise. On the one hand, Dyche is known as The Great Relegation Avoider, the man who’ll inject a bit of British beef into his players’ spines and flatten them out to such a point that they’ll do just enough to avoid the financial catastrophe of falling from the Premier League in the first place. And that’s what he managed, both at the end of last season and the season before.

But—and this is a ‘but’ so large it requires the Hubble telescope to fully be taken in—their current position is pretty desperate. They’ve scored one goal in their last five games, none of which they’ve won. They were as dismal against the current mediocre, milquetoast version of Manchester United as they were encouraging against Wolves. They’re one point and five goals’ worth of difference above the relegation places. And they didn’t seem to be improving much, either.

Scoring goals has been the clear and undeniable issue. With just fifteen of them in twenty Premier League games, the only team to have scored fewer are Southampton. Everton started the season with two humblings, 3-0 at home against Brighton and 4-0 at Spurs, but while things have picked up from losing their first four in a row, goals have dried up. They scored four of that fifteen in those first four games they lost. Add the 4-0 win against Wolves and that’s more than half of their total for the entire season.

And the sort of football which has seen them grind their way to an increasingly vertiginous-looking 16th place in the table, grinding out 0-0 draws and 1-0 wins in a way that feels more like existence than living, can even prove to be as damaging as losing every week. It’s the sort of football that makes people drift away from a club. Why spend hundreds of pounds on a season ticket, just to feel simultaneously bored to tears and uncomfortably nervous for a couple of hours every other week, nineteen times a season? When those people start to drift away, getting them back can prove very difficult, and likely financially costly.

The issue with having Sean Dyche as their manager was ultimately that just scraping by was never going to wash for that long at a club which plays It’s a Grand Old Team to Play For over the public address system at half-time. The days of Everton winning cups and league titles at least semi-regularly may now have been confined to the memories of those in their mid-30s and over, but expectation levels seem to be passed through the DNA with that transference of support from generation to generation. It’s all part of the frustration, and it wears the patience thin.

Everton can’t score goals, and the injury to Armando Broja in their 2-0 FA Cup win against Peterborough United last night leaves them with only Dominic Calvert-Lewin as their main goal scoring threat, and the days of being able to rely on him to be that threat are clearly not as great as they once might have been. Iliman Ndiaye and Dwight McNeil are their joint top scorers in the League with three each. DCL has two. This cannot continue; at least not if they want to stay up this season, it can’t.

Of course, there is a way in which Broja’s injury results in greater urgency from the club to bring in the new striker(s?) they need during the January transfer window. It could turn out that this injury is the shove that the new owners need to bring in the new players that the club needs if they’re to ensure their survival come the end of this season.

And those stakes are high. There’s a new stadium to be moved into with a far bigger capacity to fill, and the finances have been a mess. In several respects, Everton are a club who require delicate handling, and who are in a highly idiosyncratic position at present. It should surprise no-one, for example, to find out that affordable strikers who’ll score ten or fifteen goals throughout the second half of the season in the Premier League are so rare that they may as well be unicorns. The club have at best three weeks to get (at least) one.

If the media is to be believed, the club would really like David Moyes to return after his second spell at West Ham ended at the end of last season. But while there is an element of Back to the Future about all of this, it does make a degree of logistical sense. Moyes took Everton into the Champions League qualifiers and to an FA Cup final. With eleven years under his belt at Goodison Park, it can hardly be said that he doesn’t know the club, and all the better he’s untainted by the stench of the Moshiri years.

This interest betrays a degree of grounded common sense on the part of the owners of the new owners of the club, recognition that finding a new manager with such a delicate task at hand in January is not straightforward and that you should look within your means. There have been conflicting rumours of the extent of Moyes’ interest and it may still be that they end up going in different directions, but with three weeks left of that January transfer window, the clock is ticking louder and louder with each passing day, with the FA Cup Third Round only offering brief respite from the relentless grind of the Premier League.

There are always glimmers of hope. They survived the Peterborough United match—apart from Broja, that is—so remain in with some sort of chance of lifting a piece of silverware this season. They are not quite in the Premier League relegation places yet, and it can hardly be said that this particular football club isn’t used to this sort of fight. Moshiri has gone, and there have been no points deductions this season.

But being realistic, it should be concluded that these silver linings haven’t been enough, that after years of this sort of thing it’s time to take a gamble and switch things up. Just as Everton needed new ownership, so they needed a change in the direction for a team that has been stagnant for too long. What’s worrying is that they have to get a number of choices right the first time around, if they’re to retain that proud, 70-year long record of unbroken top flight football, while transitioning from existing back to something like living again.

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