The good news for Everton is that five of the 10 games they have remaining this season are at home. The bad news is that their buffer over the relegation zone is only three points and away results remain as poor as ever. Five games on the road since Frank Lampard took over have brought five defeats – and what makes this one worse is how unnecessary and self‑inflicted it felt.
“Disappointed,” Lampard said. “We deserved a point at least in general play. It was an afternoon when quite a few things went against us. There are things we can be happy about. If we carry on in that vein things will go in our favour.” And perhaps he is right. Certainly this was not a capitulation such as Everton endured at Tottenham or Crystal Palace.
But it was probably more than just the “circumstances”, as Lampard put it, of Richarlison missing a couple of one-on-ones, Aaron Cresswell scoring a free-kick, Michael Keane being sent off and Donny van de Beek suffering an injury in the warm-up. If only football would stop happening to Everton, things would be a lot easier. Then again it is true that, having got themselves into a decent position, they threw it away with a pair of daft mistakes.
There was a time when Lampard would turn up at West Ham and be greeted with implacable hostility. Not any more. There were boos before kick-off but they came largely from the away fans and were directed at Kurt Zouma. For Lampard there was nothing. At one point he wandered to the edge of the pitch to kick a ball back into the warm-up and seemed to pause as though in anticipation of the abuse. But it never came.
If indifference is the true opposite of love, of course, it made sense. What West Ham fan did not look at Lampard’s performances for Chelsea and wish he was scoring those goals in claret and blue? But what West Ham fan would look at Lampard’s time as a manager and wish it were he, rather than David Moyes, standing in their technical area? They are the ones awaiting a European quarter-final; he is the one in a relegation battle.
Everton always looked a brutally tough job. Managers from Sam Allardyce to Carlo Ancelotti, Marco Silva to Rafa Benítez have struggled with it. Nobody, really, has done it well since Moyes left in 2013. And Lampard’s past record as a manager is, at best, mixed. To say his problem at Chelsea was an inability to organise his defence is not quite true; the issue was rather organising a team that had the balance also to attack.
There was no sign here of bowing to circumstance. Everton may have leaked 14 goals in four previous away games under Lampard but there was no adopting a safety-first approach and accepting that keeping things tight might be the better part of valour. Rather Lampard went with a 4‑1‑4‑1 that would have looked even more attacking than it did if Van de Beek had not been replaced by Mason Holgate at the last minute.
The result was that even in a largely soporific first half this weary West Ham, whose focus has understandably shifted to the Europa League tie against Lyon, cut through Everton pretty much every time they were able to muster the energy to try. “It was hard work,” acknowledged David Moyes, who made no attempt to disguise the huge importance of Thursday’s game. “It could have maybe been a bit cleaner but overall at this stage of the season I’m happy to take the points and move on.”
The opening goal arrived after 31 minutes, a free-kick swept into the top corner by the former Liverpool youth player Aaron Cresswell, who is perhaps finally beginning to rediscover his form following the back injury he suffered in the autumn. West Ham’s laxity invited Everton into the game, culminating in Holgate levelling with a deflected effort following a corner.
Assuming the goal is credited to him, he becomes the first Everton player to score an away goal under Lampard (his own goal at Newcastle meant he was already the first player to score against Lampard’s Everton away from Goodison).
But the sloppiness was catching and, six minutes after Everton had pulled level, Alex Iwobi’s miscontrol allowed West Ham to restore their lead, Jarrod Bowen clipping in the rebound after Jordan Pickford had denied Michail Antonio. That was bad enough but Michael Keane, already booked, then lunged into Antonio to collect a second yellow.
And with that the game was done. The positive for Everton was that this was probably their least bad away performance under Lampard, but they were still beaten easily enough by opponents who rarely seemed to be playing much above half-pace.
