The fall-out from Everton’s 2-0 home defeat to Leicester City leaves them with the big fear of just where the goals are going to come from for the rest of this season. The Blues’ previous home match saw them go from famine to feast as they defeated Crystal Palace 3-0 but, after drawing blanks against both Fulham and now Leicester City, they are still averaging less than one goal per game with just 11 from their opening 14 matches and only the bottom two clubs, Nottingham Forest and Wolverhampton Wanderers, have netted fewer.
The Eagles’ visit to Goodison Park brought Everton centre-forward Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s first goal since he header in the goal that secured the club’s top-flight status in a dramatic 3-2 comeback win over the same opposition some 157 days earlier. But with just a single 90 minutes under his belt since returning from what manager Frank Lampard described as “a freak injury” on the eve of the current campaign, the number nine’s withdrawal just after the hour mark against the Foxes on Saturday now leaves the club sweating over the extent of a hamstring problem. In the 2019/20 and 2020/21 seasons, Calvert-Lewin recorded scoring totals of 15 and 21 in all competitions. But the recent fitness woes and susceptibility to picking up niggles from a player who was once so durable are enough to give long-suffering Evertonians sleepless nights, given the lack of firepower in the rest of the squad to compensate for when a striker who hasn’t completed four games in a row since Carlo Ancelotti was in charge is not available.
Short and spiky, Frenchman Neal Maupay brings a different dimension to Everton’s attack but while his match-winner against West Ham United suggested he can, on occasions, conjure up a chance from nothing, he has been left largely feeding on scraps from a paltry supply line. The fee which the Blues paid to take him from Brighton & Hove Albion in August was undisclosed (understood to be in the region of £15million) but one figure that is out in the open is his one goal from nine matches to date.
ANALYSIS: Blunt fan message sums up defeat as two Frank Lampard undroppables off form
VERDICT: Everton must answer huge summer question that is harming Frank Lampard progress
Anthony Gordon is currently Everton’s top scorer with three goals but after being the subject of summer transfer interest from Tottenham Hotspur, Newcastle United and then, aggressively in the final days of the window, Chelsea, the home-grown hero, handed the number 10 jersey by Lampard as a sign of his increasing importance to the team, has also struggled for consistency and was dropped to the bench for Leicester's visit. Also out wide, Dwight McNeil has netted twice but hasn’t been able to deliver the string of crosses to feed the Blues’ strikers he was brought in to provide while Demarai Gray, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, largely remains “a riddle, wrapped inside a mystery, inside an enigma.”
Ahead of the showdown against his former club, the 26-year-old declared in an interview that he suffered breakdowns during his final two seasons of his time at the King Power Stadium with a lack of game time impacting his mental health. Such revelations didn’t prevent him from being barracked mercilessly throughout Leicester 2-0 win on Saturday by the away fans. But while the Birmingham-born player has no such issues at the Blues right now, having started every Premier League game to date this season, his profligacy in front of goals casts light into why Rafael Benitez was able to bring him to Goodison Park for just £1.7million from Bayer Leverkusen.
That fee remains a snip and in the Premier League in 2022, Gray is clearly a much more valuable player than that. But for all his blistering runs – that must be hell to come up against as an opposition defender – and dangerous positions that he gets himself into on regular occasions, his end product often lets him down. His spectacular late winner against Arsenal last December – in what proved to be Benitez’s last three points – shows just what Gray is capable of, which just adds to the frustration, but his best chances of scoring seem to be the instinctive ones, when he has less time to think, like his equaliser against Nottingham Forest which remains his solitary Premier League strike so far this term.
Having conceded 66 goals last season – you have to go back to 1960/61 (69 in 42 matches) for Everton to have shipped more in a league campaign – it was clear that the summer priority for Lampard and his coaching staff had to be tightening up at the back and that remains a work in progress that has largely been a big improvement. James Tarkowski and Conor Coady have brought much greater stability in the heart of defence and while both of them to varying degrees enduring a rare off-night against Leicester, they bring far more plusses than minuses to this team.
Their form should not be a cause for concern and their respective durability, having both been virtual Premier League ever-presents for over four years, will only foster an increasingly greater understanding in the area of the pitch which depends most on communication. But although this Everton side are resolute when they have something to defend, significant question marks remain when they have to chase. Amadou Onana quipped in an interview before this game that while his Blues boss doesn’t like to show off his own playing abilities during training sessions, “we all know he’s better than many of us!”
This must be one of the most-challenging elements for great players when they become managers, trying to instil attributes that came so naturally to them into footballers who are not at those same stellar levels. Onana, Everton’s biggest signing of the summer at £33.5million, is a precocious talent who offers much to their midfield in his box-to-box role but the videos of Lampard’s goals which he also revealed he analyses at least once a week, still aren’t paying off – “I have watched his clips and goals and I think if I had his shooting ability I would be a very good player”, he added – and after 14 games the Belgian international has still yet to break his duck in English football.
Since the start of last summer, the creative outlets of James Rodriguez, Gylfi Sigurdsson and Lucas Digne have all been taken out of Everton’s team and regardless of what other attributes they would bring or not bring, they were all able to fashion a chance. In many ways, this weekend’s fixture resembled Leicester's previous visit to Goodison Park back on April 20 when the Foxes were able to open up the hosts at will but the difference that night was that the Blues were able to cling on and rescue a point through a late equaliser from Richarlison – another goal outlet now removed – and this defeat leaves them with sobering thoughts over just who they can turn to when it comes to finding the net in the months ahead.
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