The fall-out from Everton’s 2-0 home defeat to Leicester City leaves them with the big fear of just where the goals are going to come from for the rest of this season. The Blues’ previous home match saw them go from famine to feast as they defeated Crystal Palace 3-0 but, after drawing blanks against both Fulham and now Leicester City, they are still averaging less than one goal per game with just 11 from their opening 14 matches and only the bottom two clubs, Nottingham Forest and Wolverhampton Wanderers, have netted fewer.
The Eagles’ visit to Goodison Park brought Everton centre-forward Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s first goal since he header in the goal that secured the club’s top-flight status in a dramatic 3-2 comeback win over the same opposition some 157 days earlier. But with just a single 90 minutes under his belt since returning from what manager Frank Lampard described as “a freak injury” on the eve of the current campaign, the number nine’s withdrawal just after the hour mark against the Foxes on Saturday now leaves the club sweating over the extent of a hamstring problem. In the 2019/20 and 2020/21 seasons, Calvert-Lewin recorded scoring totals of 15 and 21 in all competitions. But the recent fitness woes and susceptibility to picking up niggles from a player who was once so durable are enough to give long-suffering Evertonians sleepless nights, given the lack of firepower in the rest of the squad to compensate for when a striker who hasn’t completed four games in a row since Carlo Ancelotti was in charge is not available.
Short and spiky, Frenchman Neal Maupay brings a different dimension to Everton’s attack but while his match-winner against West Ham United suggested he can, on occasions, conjure up a chance from nothing, he has been left largely feeding on scraps from a paltry supply line. The fee which the Blues paid to take him from Brighton & Hove Albion in August was undisclosed (understood to be in the region of £15million) but one figure that is out in the open is his one goal from nine matches to date.
