New Everton assistant manager Joe Edwards has explained how he and Frank Lampard want to instil a winning mentality at the club and reckons the way they want to play sits well with fans at Goodison Park.
Edwards held the same post under Lampard at Chelsea having previously worked with the west London club’s junior teams and retained the position under Thomas Tuchel before his former boss brought him to Merseyside.
Giving his first interview since joining the Blues, Edwards spelled out how he expects the players to become winners by telling evertontv: “I think that it starts from the work that you do day to day.
“You talk about mine and Frank’s background, him as a player, when you talk about success, you’re referring to a lot of trophies.
STADIUM LATEST: Exciting update as Bramley-Moore framework to emerge faster
WEATHER WATCH: Storm Eunice hits Everton travel plans for Southampton match
“At the level that I’ve worked at, it’s all relative, when you’re in the Academy there’s a lot of success where people would summarise this success based upon Youth Cup trophies and stuff like that.
“We’re not expecting to walk into a club and all of a sudden start winning silverware instantly but at the same time the standards that you set for all of the staff around the building, all of the players on a daily basis, to think like that, the way that winners do every day and push yourself, that’s the only chance you’ve got of getting anywhere near those levels over a long period.
“We just hope very quickly those improvements will lead to progress in the short term.”
When asked if the style of play he and Lampard want to adopt sits well with what Goodison desires, the 35-year-old said: “Definitely. Particularly when we haven’t got the ball, Frank and I want the team to press high up the pitch with aggression, we want to win the ball in the opposition half, be as far away from our goal as possible and be as close to their one to try and create as many chances as possible.
“There’s not many better places in the Premier League when you’re doing that they just get behind you and it feels that it gives you even more energy and even more numbers when you’re hunting the ball.
“So that’s been a real positive so far and we have to keep trying to use that. We’re lucky to have that behind us and we have to keep utilising that and that’s down to the players to keep putting the work rate in and keep buying into the ideas of how we press together.
“When we have the ball we want to find that balance. We were watching the team earlier on in the season and looking at stats as well and we thought that probably with the players that are here, it would probably be a positive thing to have more possession and control games by having the ball more.”
Edwards added: “I think if you look at the fourth goal against Brentford, which was Andros’ goal, I think that came at the end of a 30-pass passage which when I watched that back I saw the players enjoying playing, enjoying getting on the ball.
“We were in total control of the game. So that’s a big feature of how we want to play.
“At the same time, we don’t want to come and play short passes around our own box for the sake of doing that.
“We fully understand we want to be an exciting team that ultimately creates a lot of chances to score goals.
“We know that the fans at Goodison like that, they like action in and around the goal area and again it’s our duty to make that happen and we’ve got the players to do it.”
