Too good to go down?
Unfortunately, certainly not on this evidence.
Everton are again guilty of simultaneously recording a double whammy of dropping points against teams in the relegation zone and handing their struggling opponents huge morale-boosting lifelines that they can save themselves.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde – although he never had to drive back three hours through the night from Newcastle on a cold Tuesday in February – “To lose to one of your fixtures in the space of a month to a side in the bottom three may be regarded as misfortune, to lose both looks like carelessness!”
If any opponent needs a helping hand, the Blues lamentably seem all too willing to oblige.
So far this season, there’s been former Everton striker Joshua King, who failed to score in 11 games for the club last season, hadn’t found the net for Watford this season until he returned to Goodison Park.
He didn’t just break his duck of course but helped himself to a hat-trick.
In their next fixture, they did it twice in one game.
Max Kilman, a former England futsal international, hadn’t scored for Wolves since making the big step up from non-League Maidenhead United.
We know what came next.
Even £33million Wolves striker Raul Jimenez had failed to find the net at Molineux for over a year since his horrific head injury but Ben Godfrey served up the chance to put that right on a silver platter.
Brentford were without a win in their previous five Premier League fixtures – losing four – before they defeated the Blues 1-0 on November 27.
Crystal Palace had been beaten three times in a row before they thumped Everton 3-1 at Selhurst Park on December 11.
Brighton & Hove Albion had won one of their previous 13 games before recording their first ever victory at Goodison Park on January 2, almost 109 years after their first visit.
Norwich City had lost their previous Premier League games before facing the Blues on January 15, failing to score in the competition since November but they found the net twice in the space of two minutes in a 2-1 victory that brought an end to Rafa Benitez’s disastrous tenure.
The departure of the former Liverpool manager – controversially appointed by Farhad Moshiri last summer – has unfortunately not ended Everton’s charitable streak though.
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With just one goal from his first 20 matches for Aston Villa, Emiliano Buendia had struggled to live up to his £38million club record price tag since he joined the Midlanders from Norwich City as Jack Grealish’s replacement before he played at Goodison Park on January 22.
The Argentinian ended up running the show though against caretaker manager Duncan Ferguson’s side and despite being one of the smallest players on the pitch at 5ft 7in, scored in front of the Gwladys Street with the kind of header ‘Big Dunc’ himself would have been proud of – again from a corner-kick.
The same sorry set-piece trick was repeated again at St James’ Park with Mason Holgate getting the final touch to divert into his own net a mere 108 seconds after Everton had got their noses in front through Jamaal Lascelles – the shortest gap between two own goals in Premier League history.
There was more shambolic defending from the visitors for Newcastle’s second goal – just the four men across the six-yard box unable to keep the ball out – and the coup de grace came from Kieran Trippier, a full-back who hadn’t found the net for three-and-a-half years since August 2018 on the same day that Marco Silva was managing the Blues at Goodison Park for the first time.
As much as Everton’s players and long-suffering supporters needed an afternoon like Brentford on Saturday, Tuesday’s trip to Tyneside saw them crash back down to Earth with an almighty thud and unfortunately it was the display at the weekend which is the exception to the rule of late.
It’s now just six points taken from the last 45 on offer for the Blues.
Over the course of an entire Premier League season that would equate to 15 points.
That’s the same as Sunderland’s total in 2005/06 with only Derby County’s 11 in 2007/08 worse.
While the costly defeat to Newcastle United – which breathes new life into their season – ensures the honeymoon period is already over for Frank Lampard, the new Everton manager is right to try not to over-emphasise the importance of individual fixtures in isolation or instil a feeling of panic among his squad.
He correctly points out that there are enough matches left – his side also have three postponed fixtures originally scheduled for December yet to play too – for his team to get themselves out of trouble.
But (and we keep saying this) the tide needs to turn and quickly.
Following the aforementioned defeat to Villa when browbeaten Evertonians were coming to terms with the sobering reality that the return of Ferguson in the dugout could not provide their team with a timely shot in the arm second time around, Jim Keoghan, author of Highs, Lows and Bakayokos: Everton in the 1990s , pointed out the list of supposedly mitigating circumstances that continued to be trotted out to reassure fans that their under-achieving team would be alright.
Keoghan told his Twitter followers: “Wait until the tough run ends”,
“Wait until we get DCL back”,
“Wait until we have our best 11”,
“Wait until Benitez has gone”.
“Maybe Everton are just s****?”
When it comes to the spine of the team the Blues were without as they entered this winter of discontent, Yerry Mina and Abdoulaye Doucoure are crocked again while last season’s top scorer Dominic Calvert-Lewin has yet to score since his January 2 return and spent the Newcastle United game on the substitutes bench having recovered from his latest knock.
One of the major problems that continues to dog this group of Everton players is their inconsistency.
Rather than follow up the weekend’s positive showing against Brentford that produced the biggest win for a new manager in his first game throughout the club’s history, they condemned Lampard to being as BT Sport said “Everton’s first manager since Gordon Lee in 1977 to lose his first league game in charge.”
In a classic case of ‘Lies, damned lies and statistics’ there was a bit of semantic gymnastics with such a claim given that Howard Kendall lost his first league game 2-1 at home to Crystal Palace in 1997, in what was his third spell in charge, but regardless of such unwanted notoriety, the defeat ratchets up the stakes for when Lampard’s old ‘Spygate’ foe Marcelo Bielsa brings his Leeds United side to Goodison on Saturday.
It was the same after what remains the Blues’ last Premier League win to date against Arsenal.
The euphoria of that last-gasp comeback success should have been a watershed moment in the campaign but six days later was the debacle at Selhurst Park when Benitez basically conceded he wasn’t going to attempt to coach his players to try and pass the ball properly.
Such Jekyll & Hyde back-to-back displays are not isolated incidents either.
Just five days after the 3-1 home win over Burnley on September 13, in which the Clarets were blown away by three goals in just six second half minutes, a result that took Everton joint top of the fledgling Premier League table, they slumped to a 3-0 defeat at Aston Villa, conceding three times in the space of nine minutes.
Some of this squad have played under all six managers that Mr Moshiri has appointed in less than six years at the helm and as they try to adapt to the methods of the latest incumbent in the dugout, they need to start taking their share of accountability for the poor results.
Here is a team who last season were second in the table as late as Boxing Day.
That if we’re honest is a false position but so too should be their current lowly station but the old adage that the league table never lies cannot be discounted.
If you look at the individual pedigrees of those among this expensively-assembled group then they clearly have the talent to be at least safely placed in mid-table if not even challenging for Europe.
But instead, in the week that Queen Elizabeth II began her Platinum Jubilee as this country’s longest-reigning monarch, they find themselves staring into the abyss of would be Everton’s first relegation since 1951, a time before the now 95-year-old sovereign even took the crown.
While they somehow made Allan Saint-Maximin look like Lionel Messi, the rest of the Newcastle side were hardly world-beaters but while their visitors wilted, they played gamely and displayed the stomach for the fight needed in the weeks ahead.
The team who had to pull off the Blues’ first Premier League ‘Great Escape’ in 1994 were also a talented bunch as their FA Cup success of the following year – still the club’s last major honour to date – showed but the men who would become Joe Royle’s ‘Dogs of War’ could never be accused of lacking character.
Under Lampard, a leader who at least has the backing of the fanbase – it doesn’t bear thinking about how Vitor Pereira would be coping in this situation – the current Everton side must now show that won’t be their failing.
