If ever a contest highlighted the dilemma at the heart of Everton's season, it was last weekend against Nottingham Forest.
They had the better chances against Steve Cooper's side whose spending on new players has reached £150m this summer, but in the end were perhaps fortunate to have escaped with a point.
If there was a contrast between the teams on show at Goodison Park, then it came towards the end of the contest. The visitors went ahead with a cool finish from the highly-rated Brennan Johnson, showing exactly why he was the club’s top scorer in their promotion campaign.
At the other end, Demarai Gray capitalised on a route one approach when Forest keeper Dean Henderson found himself out of position to stroke home…but Everton should have killed the game afterwards. Henderson atoned with a save from Anthony Gordon at the end, but really the forward should have scored, after being presented with his side’s best opportunities throughout the game. And here is the dilemma. Gordon represents Everton’s future, but their needs are very much in the here and now. They have one point from three games…and no threat up front at all.
If that carries on - with Dominic Calvert-Lewin out for at least six weeks - then another relegation battle looms. And yet there is an offer of £45m on the table from Chelsea for Gordon, an eye watering sum for a player with just one full Premier League season behind him. There are links with proven goalscorers, and that money would pay for one, no question, who would surely transform Frank Lampard’s team.
Gordon is many things, but he is not a finisher. He scored four goals last season, with two assists, and of those four, three were deflections. Here, never really worked the keeper as Johnson so emphatically did. Lampard himself became of the country’s foremost finishers - he is still SIXTH in the Premier League all time scoring charts, and he believes he can help Gordon improve that crucial part of his game.
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“Look, I don’t want to make this a press conference about Anthony Gordon’s finishing. We work on it all the time, myself, my staff, everybody, it is a general thing we work with attacking players,” he said. “So most days we work with Anthony on it, because he is a great professional with a real hunger. He wants to work on it. Some of it is just pure development - the goals will just come, but it takes a bit of time to get that in your game.”
And Lampard cites his own career as an example of how that instinct in front of goal develops. He explained that he was two or three years older than Gordon before it finally clicked. “I am not sitting here saying that at 20 years of age I was a goal machine. At 20 years of age I wouldn’t have got into a modern-day Chelsea team with the way I was playing,” he said, “I wasn’t feeling as confident to rack up big numbers until I was in my low to mid-twenties, 23, 24 and onwards. It is an absolute process and players absolutely can improve on it.
“So I certainly don’t want this to sound like it is all about Anthony Gordon’s progress. That goes for every attacking player. I always found working during the week made me lucky at the weekends and it also made me better.” What Lampard couldn’t say, is that he may be forced into swapping those future goals for some guaranteed ones now, because Everton can’t afford to wait until Calvert-Lewin is fully fit and firing again. By then, it may already be too late.
