Beaten but unbowed
A week after proclaiming that improvement does not follow a straight line, Everton’s passionate but pragmatic manager Frank Lampard admitted before this game – the first of two difficult away days in the space of five days – that a season of ‘success’ might even include more defeats that victories. This wasn’t a negative abandonment of the club’s proud ‘Nil Satis Nisi Optimum’ motto from one of the few Premier League managers who has studied Latin but a realistic assessment of just where his team find themselves as they look to regroup after the joint lowest equivalent points total in their history.
Everton once again emerge from this fixture with nothing tangible to show for their efforts but the difference between this display and the chaotic capitulation on the previous visit back in March was like night and day. Back then, the Blues were 3-0 down at half-time, 4-0 behind a minute after the restart and being beaten 5-0 with less than an hour on the clock. Here, they thwarted their gifted opponents for approximately the same time period before eventually letting them through. That chastening night when the home fans taunted Lampard by calling him a “s*** Steven Gerrard” before high-profile scribes asked the question whether Everton were “too bad to stay up” proved to be a watershed moment for the Blues boss.
