Going down without a fight
One thing Sean Dyche will – quite rightly – demand from all his teams is commitment so on his first Merseyside derby and first fixture away from Goodison Park, the new Everton manager will surely be bitterly disappointed that his players went down without a fight. Never mind a snood or a hat – two items the new boss has banned squad members from wearing in training as they’re not allowed in matches – Everton didn’t so much as lay a glove on Liverpool in this insipid surrender less than a mile from their home where they’d inflicted a first defeat since September on Premier League leaders Arsenal just nine days earlier.
If only the Blues had shown the same kind of battling qualities in general play as when they sparked into life five minutes from the end when irked by Andy Robertson’s moment of petulance. The game had already been lost with the result beyond doubt when Jordan Pickford – who was booked alongside the Scot – waded in and both sets of players and substitutes joined the handbags in what was an unsavoury and unnecessary pantomime scuffle that didn’t reflect positively on either side in terms of its pettiness.
The incident took place in close proximity to the travelling Evertonians in the Anfield Road Stand and smacked of playing to the gallery in a desperate attempt to show some heart but it was too little and too late.
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With 22 sendings off in total, the Merseyside derby has produced more red cards than any other fixture in Premier League history but this melee felt more like a choreographed routine you might see from pseudo-sports like professional wrestling than the blood and thunder that Blues would expect.
Having not beaten Liverpool in front of fans here since 1999 or anywhere with spectators present since 2010, this was again all too timid. No Everton manager, especially Dyche, will surely put up with that.
Thrown in at the deep end
There have been a few unlikely Merseyside derby heroes over the years and sometimes throwing in a fearless rookie produces a surprise package like Danny Cadamarteri, but whereas Everton could regularly upset their neighbours in the fixture a generation ago, when Howard Kendall fielded the teenager from Cleckheaton, Ellis Simms was given a much more daunting task here. Born on the other side of the Pennines to the Blues’ hero in this fixture from back in 1997, at 22 years of age, Simms is not a precocious youth but he remains largely untried at the highest level.
Loaned out to Blackpool, Heart of Midlothian and most-recently Sunderland – where he enjoyed a better goals per minute ratio than Coventry City’s Viktor Gyokeres this season – he’s shown competence in finding the net when called upon but moving up to the Premier League is the biggest step of all. Several of Simms’ team-mates came up to him with a series of encouraging hugs before kick-off but while he certainly didn’t look out of place, his lack of experience among the elite appeared brutally apparent.
As obvious you might say as Everton’s need for additional firepower in January, a window in which the club were understood to be looking to bring in a couple of new attacking outlets but only ended up bringing back their own man Simms from Wearside. Owner Farhad Moshiri proclaimed, “if we need a striker, we’ll get one”, but unlike all of their relegation rivals who all bolstered their ranks, director of football Kevin Thelwell was unable to welcome any new faces through the door.
Given Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s fitness woes over the past 18 months – and £45m being brought in for Anthony Gordon – that appears a dereliction of duty and puts Simms and Dyche in a position they shouldn’t find themselves in. Moshiri – who watched his first and last game of Frank Lampard’s reign at West Ham United – still hasn’t attending a fixture on Merseyside since the 5-2 capitulation against Watford on October 23, 2021, but after missing both of the last two home fixtures and not being present to support Dyche on his Goodison Park bow, it seems damning that chairman Bill Kenwright and the board felt they weren’t safe among a crowd of 39,000 mostly consisting of Evertonians but could sit among over 50,000 here surrounded by Liverpool fans.
Run, run whoever you may be
After being put through their paces during their first week of training under Dyche at Finch Farm – including having a series of bleep tests – Everton covered more ground against Arsenal than they’d done all season, but here they were mostly left chasing shadows. Most of their sprints appeared to be back towards their own goal rather than pushing forward and try as they might, too often they couldn’t even get close enough to Liverpool’s players to even stop them – and even foul them – as they were given a chastening chasing by the Reds’ speed of movement and thought.
The Premier League is the quickest football on the planet but even taking that into account, it was ridiculous how soon the Blues went from hitting the woodwork at one end to conceding – and having so many of their players woefully out of position – at the other. Maddeningly for their supporters, a string of Everton teams, for a long time now, seem to have suffered from some kind of inferiority complex when coming up against their neighbours and a Liverpool team who were all-conquering not-too-long ago but have been a shell of their former selves of late, became the latest in a line of opponents requiring a pick-me-up who the Blues were all too accommodating to offer a helping hand.
They simply cannot allow themselves to wallow in this defeat for long, though, as what was always going to be their most-important fixture of the season to date at home to Leeds United remains on the horizon this Saturday. If last February’s corresponding fixture felt big, Everton’s next game is enormous in terms of ensuring that they bring the Yorkshire side into their orbit and avoid the prospect of clear daylight opening up between the clubs.
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