What Everton players did will give Frank Lampard…

What Everton players did will give Frank Lampard encouragement after falling into Leeds trap

Everton fans heading back home on Tuesday evening will have a familiar feeling.

Despite their side taking the lead and heading into the break with a 1-0 advantage, they were leaving with only a point to their name. Now, in many ways, that could be a good result depending on how the rest of the season goes - and that could be the debate that many will have in their cars and coaches.

But you can't help but be frustrated, can you? Realistically, it was the same mistakes that Everton made against Brentford last time out.

Just like on Saturday, Everton came out for the second half far too slowly and handed their opponents the upper hand in what was already a cauldron of noise inside Elland Road. Jordan Pickford was called into action to beat away a powerful effort from Brenden Aaronson, before Jack Harrison didn't get hold of a shot inside the box.

For the opening minutes after the break, you could feel the goal coming. The visitors had once again dropped too far back and it was almost inevitable that Leeds were going to take advantage at some stage.

The parallels between that and Saturday's game were disappointing to see, but there were caveats. It was such a quick turnaround between the two matches with very little time on the training pitch, it was going to be tough to make a real wholesale change in that sense.

And, this was a new system that Everton had taken up too. Rather than the 3-4-3 that they had lined up with throughout the beginning of last term and at the beginning of this, they instead switched to a 4-3-3 - no doubt because of yet another injury in central defence against Brentford.

The real difference this time around is that the visitors had some real chances to win this match. Against the Bees, it was only really a Demarai Gray one-on-one opportunity that gave them hope of scoring in the second half - and that wasn't even shown on Match Of The Day .

This time, the winger was so close to beating the offside trap before slotting the ball home. The replays and the VAR graphic did little to convince Blues that the right decision had been made.

A corner fell all the way to the brilliant Amadou Onana too and his snatched effort was headed clear by Rasmus Kristensen, before Nathan Patterson had the best opportunity of anyone on either side to win it. He found himself in space inside the box, but slammed his effort straight at a grateful Illan Meslier.

So, how much heart do you take from that reaction? That's all down to personal opinion.

At one stage it looked like similar mistakes from the weekend were going to condemn Everton to another defeat this season, but instead they rallied and might actually be disappointed not to have taken all three points.

However, again, this wasn't exactly a good performance. Organised and spirited in defence particularly, granted, but not something that the Blues can rely on for an entire campaign.

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