Abdoulaye Doucoure has just answered big Everton…

Abdoulaye Doucoure has just answered big Everton concern and set Amadou Onana challenge

I’m really pleased with Abdoulaye Doucoure’s revival at Everton which continued with his second goal in as many away matches at Chelsea on Saturday.

He wasn’t getting any game time under Frank Lampard and there were even questions about his professionalism and whether we’d see him in a blue shirt again but like I say regularly in my column, whether you want to be at this football club or not, you need to start putting performances in and since Sean Dyche has come in, Doucoure has done just that.

We wondered who was going to rise to the occasion and take these games by the scruff of the neck. Doucoure was one of the main men under Carlo Ancelotti and we hadn’t seen displays like that for a while.

We also wanted to know where the goals were going to come from with Dominic Calvert-Lewin out and looked to the likes of Demarai Gray, Dwight McNeil and Alex Iwobi but I wasn’t expecting Doucoure to step up but it’s brilliant to see him doing that and getting the best out of playing in that more forward position. He’s got the legs to get himself in the box and he’s an extra number in there, a headache for the opposition as they aren’t expecting Everton to get into the box in numbers but Doucoure is finding himself in the right positions.

That’s now setting the bar for his team-mates to see if they can start scoring too. Amadou Onana has missed a few chances and there should be a little competition while the main striker is out as to who can score the most goals.

We’re obsessed with ourselves at Everton and that’s obviously where we put most of our focus and energy on but you can see the pressure at our next opponent Tottenham Hotspur where, despite the team doing pretty well, the fanbase still aren’t happy, the manager doesn’t look happy and neither do the players. They recently had former Goodison Park favourite Richarlison coming out and questioning his game time at the club and now Antonio Conte has launched a passionate speech in his post-match press conference at Southampton after they drew 3-3 having been 3-1 up.

We don’t know why he’s done that but maybe Conte has tried everything else and he feels his only option is to call the boys out in public and see if he can get a reaction out of them. It shows you how much it means to him and it’s difficult to stay on the right side of the line in terms of your reaction when things are going against you.

There are question marks over whether Southampton should have had a penalty – I don’t think it was as I don’t think the defender touched him – but us as Evertonians have had so many decisions go against us and we know what it’s like to be frustrated with referees. You can have as many apologies as you want from the officials that they got certain decisions wrong but at the end of the season, missing out on those points could see us go down.

It’s all well and good when things are going your way but as we saw with the reaction from Fulham’s Aleksandar Mitrovic at Manchester United in the FA Cup, people can lose control. Ultimately, people in professional football are role models for kids – I’ve seen youngsters during games going around talking with their hands over their mouths like they’re on camera – and they do copy them.

When you do step out of line, you need to hold your hand up because these things shouldn’t happen on a football pitch. Talk of a 10-match ban for Mitrovic sounds a bit harsh to me but I don’t know what he thought was going to happen by shouting at the referee, it’s not like he was ever going to change his decision because he was in his face and it wasn’t even down to him anyway, it was VAR.

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