After Idrissa Gueye had shot from a free kick, Dwight McNeil scored from a corner. Everton had a goal from a set-piece: just not how they intended. But then their recent goals tended to have a freakish element. There was Michael Keane, scoring in spectacular style from long range and for 10 men in injury time against Tottenham, which may not happen again. There was Ellis Simms, scoring in the Premier League, which may not happen again. There was McNeil, going out on his own as Everton’s top scorer by finding the net from a corner.
As the country’s lowest scorers breached its most frugal defence, it came inadvertently. If it was an entertaining, if irrelevant, oddity in itself, Everton would be still less potent without one-offs. Newcastle’s quartet at Goodison Park took their tally to 10 goals in five days. Everton have only got 10 since Sean Dyche took over. They only got 10 in the league under Frank Lampard from the start of September.
They rarely look like scoring now. “I think that has been going on for about two years,” snapped Dyche. If he had a point, if their return of their last 66 games under Rafa Benitez, Duncan Ferguson, Lampard and him stands at just 58 goals, it felt an attempt to dodge the blame. Dyche had turned up at Goodison Park and suggested that he could get them scoring. Not thus far.
“I didn’t say they are going to get 30 goals,” he countered now. With five games to go, Everton need five to bring up 30 for the season, let alone individually. They won’t get there by letting Gueye take free kicks. It wasn’t quite the equivalent of the infamous time when Louis van Gaal put Phil Jones on corners at Manchester United; when Gueye, with four goals in 137 games for Everton, skied his shot, it did reflect a lack of compelling alternatives.
That seems sadly allied with a lack of a strategy to score. For much of the season, it has consisted of hoping Dominic Calvert-Lewin would be fit and waiting for him to return during interminable absences. Calvert-Lewin is two games into his comeback and no goals, after a perfectly dinked finish was disallowed after he was marginally offside. His lone legitimate strike this season came in October. As Newcastle ran riot, Callum Wilson received rather more service than Calvert-Lewin.
Everton seem to have only the flawed strategy of relying on an injury-prone, one-goal striker to extend their 69-year stay in the top flight. They have another one-goal striker, in Neal Maupay, whose drought now extends to 24 games. They have a third one-goal striker, in Simms. While their specialist strikers have only three goals combined at a point where Dixie Dean’s records are coming under threat from Erling Haaland, Everton need few reminders that their record signing got 60 in one league campaign on his own.
Now the Toffees have only scored twice or more in one game at Goodison Park this season. The Dyche formula was initially to win 1-0, which they did against Arsenal, Leeds and Brentford. Now they have the worst of both worlds. They have become a defensive team who have forgotten how to defend. They have conceded 20 goals in ten games while over Dyche’s reign, only Chelsea have scored fewer.
They lack the personnel and the plan alike. When their third-highest scorer this season came on, it was for a brief cameo in a Newcastle shirt: Anthony Gordon left in January and was not replaced. Demarai Gray is the second highest, but two of his four goals were penalties. Oddly, Dyche left him on the bench against Newcastle.
Whereas Newcastle have three players in double figures, Everton have one man halfway there: McNeil, whose accidental strike took him to five.
Gordon was scarcely prolific but he serves as an illustration of how Everton’s past has caught up with them, how their misadventures in the transfer market have stretched from the players they signed to the ones they didn’t and couldn’t.
Their fruitless deadline day left them without reinforcements. They couldn’t buy before selling Gordon, just as they had to let last season’s top scorer Richarlison go by 30 June: Financial Fair Play issues, the legacy of Everton’s overspending for years, have hamstrung them. Their rivals can argue the regulations are working.
Their supporters may question the powerbrokers who bought Maupay last summer failed to get a signing in the last 48 hours of the January window. They can look at a squad with a host of midfielders, none of whom have a track record of scoring regularly. They can wonder why they hired a manager indelibly associated with 4-4-2 when they lacked the centre-forwards to play the formation.
They can also look at Dyche’s disastrous decisions to play 4-4-2 against Manchester United and Fulham, stripping Everton of momentum when they had fared better with five midfielders. They had scored six goals in four games before the trip to Old Trafford. Since then, they have two in four.
“Goals change games,” said Dyche. They change seasons and destinies, too. Instead of scoring more, Everton have conceded more and are on course for the lowest tally in their history, and one of its lowest points.
Under Farhad Moshiri’s ownership, they have spent over half a billion – albeit not in the same season – and can’t find the net. In the worst year to be compared to Chelsea, they are the Chelsea of the north.
