Former Crystal Palace chairman Simon Jordan believes Everton should have enough to escape relegation with Frank Lampard in charge but had reservations over the ex-Chelsea boss getting the job in the first place.
Lampard arrived at Goodison Park at the end of January with the club lying in 16th place in the Premier League with the task of avoiding relegation to the Championship. Two wins over two months have left the club perched dangerously over the relegation zone but three points clear of Watford with two games in hand.
Win those pair of games and another due to playing a game less than Leeds United and Brentford above them and the Toffees would almost certainly keep their place in England's top-flight for at least another season. However, the manner in which Everton collapsed in the FA Cup quarter-finals against Crystal Palace before the international break left a bitter taste in fans mouth.
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Alluding to the initial decision to hire the former England midfielder and not keep caretaker boss Duncan Ferguson in charge longer, Jordan said that Everton can no longer get rid of Lampard in order to save their season and that 'there's enough juice' for the club to get over the line, even if that comes down to the teams below them being worse from now until the end of the season.
“Taking on the Everton role I was reticent, because while you only gain experience how do you become experienced in relegation battles? By being involved in them,” he told talkSPORT.
“That’s fine if the framework of the club is right, but the managerial appointment has been wrong. Everything is right, the sporting director, the resources behind the scenes are right – at Everton that’s not the case.
“So you’re taking somebody who has very little experience of the challenging end of football, i.e. the battle to survive end, and putting them in amongst a group of dysfunctional players that are dispirited and demoralised, and not good enough, and trying to get a song out of them.
“Now Frank has got some results there, obviously the capitulation against Crystal Palace on Sunday was quite brutal in terms of what you saw from Everton because for 15/20 minutes they were in the game and for the next 70 minutes after Palace scored they had no resistance.
“There’s no way you can take Frank Lampard out now, you put him in there. There’s X amount of games. There’s enough juice in Everton to get past the problem they’ve got, but it’s going to be nip and tuck and it might simply be that the three sides beneath them are just simply so poor that Everton get away by default.
“But I do think it was a risk for Everton. I do think they should’ve paused, looked at it more, maybe put Duncan Ferguson in place for a month to give themselves opportunity to get some heart and feeling into the club. But they haven’t, so Frank’s got to dig in.”
Everton return after the international break with a trip to West Ham United and then head to Turf Moor to face Burnley who are 19th in the Premier League and are currently separated by four points. Jordan can't see the Toffees going down but added that they should never have been in this position giving the money spent on the players and the size of the club.
“What happens to big clubs when they get relegated is they find it very difficult to get out of the division again,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen to Everton, they’ve been close before. This is not where Everton should be. They should be somewhere else and there’s a few people who should be put in the firing line for where they are right now, most notably the owner, but that’s a different discussion.
“What happens if Everton get relegated is they’re going to have to get themselves together really quickly like Newcastle did when they got relegated, and get back out of the division.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen and they won’t be in a position where they’ll find themselves compromised financially because they’ve got a very wealthy owner that can stand it. But there will be an absolute degradation and degrading of Everton as a football club because there’s no parallel universe where a club like this, with the kind of investment that’s been put into it, can be anywhere near this."
