Unfortunately Everton have travelled about as well as Guinness in recent times but if the Blues want to be raising a glass to toast Premier League survival this season then chances are they going to have to buck their ideas up on the road.
League matches against Fulham used to be Everton’s biggest home banker – between 1961-2018 they won 21 in a row at Goodison Park – but last Saturday’s 3-1 defeat to a Marco Silva side who had lost their previous five has left the Blues’ top-flight status in the balance. With seven games remaining – four of which are away – only goal difference is currently keeping Sean Dyche’s men out of the bottom three as they bid to avoid what would be the club’s first relegation in 72 years.
In order to avoid the drop, it looks like Everton are now going to have to secure results on their travels. They have a massive-looking ‘six-pointer’ at second-bottom Leicester City on May 1, but before then there is also the trip to Crystal Palace this Saturday to tackle a side who have expunged their own slide toward danger with a hat-trick of wins under Croydon’s very own Methuselah of managers, Roy Hodgson, now less than four months shy of his 76th birthday. With the Eagles now looking safe, the Blues ‘should’ want this more. But the same could have been said when the Cottagers came to Goodison with manager Silva banished to the stands and top scorer Aleksandar Mitrovic suspended. However, it was the hosts, who in the words of Dyche himself, looked “lackadaisical” rather than the visitors ‘having their flip-flops on’.
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The harsh reality facing Everton though is that their away form has been woeful for the past couple of seasons now. In the 2020/21 season, played mostly behind closed doors and largely eradicating home advantage, the Blues picked up 11 away wins – including their first Merseyside Derby success at Anfield since 1999 and a first-ever victory at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium – but since crowds came back en masse at the start of the 2021/22 campaign it’s mostly been a trail of tears for them.
Former Everton player Michael Ball described the Blues away record as “atrocious” in his ECHO column as he pondered how they might be able to improve upon it. But just how bad has it been? Over the past two seasons, the period in which coronavirus-induced attendance restrictions were removed, Manchester City unsurprisingly top the Premier League away table with 23 wins and 76 points.
Next up are this term’s overall leaders Arsenal with 20 wins and 64 points. Making up the quartet of Champions League qualifiers based on their travels for the past two years would be Tottenham Hotspur with 14 wins and 61 points followed by Liverpool with 17 wins and 59 points.
The rest of the top 10 goes as follows – Chelsea 16 wins/56 points; Brighton & Hove Albion 14 wins/54 points; Manchester United 13 wins/46 points; Newcastle United 12 wins/46 points; Aston Villa 13 wins/43 points; Wolverhampton Wanderers 10 wins/38 points. Below them are Brentford nine wins/38 points; Crystal Palace eight wins/35 points; West Ham United nine wins/33 points; Leicester City eight wins/31 points; Leeds United seven wins/29 points and Southampton seven wins/28 points.
Indeed, not only are Everton the worst away from home of all 17 clubs to have competed in the Premier League over both the past two campaigns, they’re also a long way back. Their paltry three wins (at Brighton & Hove Albion plus Leicester City last season and Southampton this term) are less than half the total of next lowest Leeds and Southampton, both on seven, while they’re nine points adrift of the Saints at the foot of the travel table.
Even this season, only Nottingham Forest have fared worse. Like the Blues, Forest have just one solitary away win. But they have taken just six points taken on their travels as opposed to nine by Everton, Leeds and West Ham. When addressing the issue after the defeat to Fulham, Dyche said: “The away form has been poor for the last two years, I can’t brush that away, that’s the truth. So you’ve got two years of correction and what we’ve been trying to do is correct the mentality of away form and performance level because they’re hand in hand.”
Eradicating the problem is something for both team and manager alike to tackle though. Over that same period over the past two seasons, Dyche has himself won away just once in 20 Premier League away matches – at Brighton with Burnley on February 19 last year – picking up 11 points in total. Home comforts alone may not be enough to save Everton now. So the Blues boss and his players require a swift cure to their collective travel sickness if they’re to keep their heads above water.
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