The Grand Old Lady is sick
It’s almost like there are two Evertons right now, the ailing on-the-field Blues, coughing and wheezing their way through another Premier League season of struggle and their potentially more robust counterparts of tomorrow at the new stadium which is rising majestically before our eyes, and tantalisingly offering a brighter future.
However, everyone knows that relocating to a new 52,888 capacity home by the banks of the Mersey will be futile if the club that proudly boasts more seasons in English top flight football than any other doesn’t have a Premier League team to play in it.
This time a year ago, the site at Bramley-Moore Dock boasted just one new above ground construction after being infilled but after 12 months of dramatic progress, it has been transformed to create what is already clearly recognisable as an iconic piece of architecture.
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So long as building remains on schedule, 2023 will be the last full year of football at Goodison Park but the truth is that this historic venue is now sick and while she rallied last spring, it’s to be hoped that another bout of winter ailments have not left her terminally ill.
Before this game, members of the Everton Fans’ Forum had launched an impassioned rallying cry to “bring the noise” but there’s only so much that the supporters can do when the football they’re being served up by their team is so insipid.
Narrowly avoiding what was almost a first relegation in 71 years with a joint lowest equivalent points total in the club’s history should have proven to be the Blues’ nadir but their current plight now looks even more perilous and it’s not like they haven’t been warned.
Never go back
There is an old adage in football that you should never go back but over the years Everton have perhaps been as guilty as any club when it comes to trying to defy such wisdom and right now Idrissa Gueye is the latest Prodigal Son to be flattering to deceive on his second coming.
Despite being without his regular partner in the engine room due to Amadou Onana’s suspension, the Senegalese international produced an industrious first half display but he ended up suffering badly after the break by playing a central, culpable role in Brighton’s next two goals.
After an impressive first spell at Goodison Park between 2016-19, Gueye spent the next three seasons among the rarefied air of the world’s richest club as he got to strut his stuff alongside the likes of Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and then Lionel Messi at petrodollar-fuelled Paris Saint-Germain. Moving the ball on to such magicians must have been a luxurious experience compared to the harsh reality he faces now.
When you give the ball away at PSG in Ligue 1, there’s usually more than enough quality around to get you out of trouble but when you’re in the thick of a Premier League relegation battle, any such mistakes are often ruthlessly punished. Now 33, Gueye’s mistimed challenge enabled Brighton to double their lead and there was worse to come when he picked out Pascal Gross with a pass that had the perfect weight off a Messi assist.
It’s unfair to pin all the blame on individuals, especially someone who has given so much to the Everton cause through as many determined displays as Gueye but whereas Nathan Patterson, whose individual error led to the first goal, is a talented youngster still learning the game, you need your senior pros to stand up and be counted when the going gets tough.
Road to Wigan fear
Almost a decade ago, in March 2013, Everton were also undone by a quick-fire treble from an opponent at Goodison Park when Wigan Athletic arrived for an FA Cup quarter-final. That capitulation, with the three goals coming in just three minutes – half the time it took Brighton & Hove Albion to plunder their second half blitz – came at a time when the incumbent Blues boss David Moyes had been at the helm for 11 years but this setback came under Frank Lampard, the sixth man to sit in the home dugout here in as many years.
Ironically, his cup conqueror Roberto Martinez would prove to be his successor that summer but in what seemed like an indication of the desperation by those among Everton’s corridors of power, it’s understood that when they last made a managerial switch just under a year ago, the Catalan – Farhad Moshiri’s first sacking – was the first person they turned to after dismissing Rafael Benitez.
Back then he was still employed by the Belgium national team and going into a World Cup year and while any such appointment, following on from a former Liverpool boss, would have represented something of an ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’ scenario for Evertonians but now beleaguered Blues don’t know where to turn or who to point the finger of blame at.
As Brighton were tearing their team apart, home fans chanted “sack the board” and individual players seemed to be on the receiving end of some boos. Lampard himself, bound by the same rules by which all managers are judged, knows he too cannot be immune to criticism and for all his talk that he came into this job in a relegation battle, almost a year on, he and his team, while not world-beaters, should be doing better than this… so much better.
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