Everton finally looked like a team making it their mission to stay up at Brighton & Hove Albion but their emphatic 5-1 triumph cannot now be allowed to become a hollow victory.
The many thousands of loyal but long-suffering Evertonians will each have their own personal thoughts over how they felt about their team’s chances of survival but the prevailing mood seemed to be that the 4-1 home defeat to Newcastle United on April 27, the night that Goodison Park gave its all, asked the players to “fight for us” but then saw the team surrender with a whimper was the night Blues feared the lights were starting to go out on their long top flight tenure.
However, this morale-boosting success at the Amex Stadium – as impressive as it was pleasantly surprising – has suddenly breathed new life into Everton’s hopes of avoiding the ignominy of what would be their first relegation in 72 years.
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Manager Sean Dyche has always preached for better or for worse that merely climbing out of the drop zone means nothing and the only table that matters is the final one but this felt like something big, something potentially pivotal, like the movement of tectonic plates among those involved in this dogfight. Everton haven’t just shook things up on what looked like a day of destiny for the Premier League’s strugglers, they’ve caused an earthquake.
It won’t have been a statistic on Dyche’s radar – like the fact this was the club’s biggest away success since they beat his Burnley side by the same scoreline on Boxing Day 2018, something that the Blues boss had pointed out to him in a rather tactless manner in the post-match press conference – but if they’d have lost to Brighton & Hove Albion, Everton would have been guaranteed to finish with the lowest equivalent points haul in their entire history.
That particular low benchmark was set only last season when they equalled their 39 point tally from 2003/04 and chances are that regardless of whether they stay up or not, Everton will still be worse off this term. However, after months of turmoil and disappointment both on and off the pitch, here was a rare highlight from a traumatic campaign, a moment to savour for beleaguered Blues who once again packed out their away allocation for a 550-mile return trip from Merseyside after being fed a starvation diet when it came to crumbs of comfort in recent times.
It’s imperative though that Dyche’s men now build on this timely lifeline they’ve given themselves. The day before Everton went to Brighton was the anniversary of the Blues’ ‘Great Escape’ against Wimbledon in 1994, when they first secured Premier League survival on the last day of a season and despite the stress that experience had on fans who lived through it – and the unwelcome sequel against Coventry City four years later – things had become so desperate, many would have taken that scenario again this term.
That may yet still prove the case when Bournemouth come to Goodison Park on May 28 but now there’s not just a chance for Everton to keep their destiny in their own hands but also an opportunity of even getting the job done before another potential nerve-racking finale. It goes without saying that their next challenge against reigning champions and league leaders Manchester City is the most-daunting fixture on the list but the Blues couldn’t have asked for a more positive warm-up to such stern challenge and hopefully the Grand Old Lady will be rocking again and the home players now possess a regained confidence to actually feed off that energy.
If Newcastle United was Dyche’s nadir, the response since then has been overwhelmingly positive, even if it included the roller-coaster journey from Jordan Pickford’s penalty save at the King Power Stadium – when Everton would have found themselves staring into the abyss if they’d somehow gone 3-1 down to fellow strugglers Leicester City despite dominating the first half – to routing this season’s best pound-for-pound performers in the Premier League in their own back yard. While the Foxes and Leeds United – even with Sam Allardyce now at the helm – both continue to flounder, the Blues have finally clicked into gear and other than their stricken skipper Seamus Coleman who has been cruelly sidelined for the run-in through injury, the manager now has all his big hitters back and on form.
For now, the inevitable inquest as to just how a club of Everton’s size and resources finds itself in such a precarious position again can wait. The hope is back, momentum has taken a massive shift and it’s time for the Blues to finish the task at hand and allow their legions of supporters who deserve much better to once more sleep easy in their beds again.
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