It might not have been the victory that Everton craved but that scruffy, deflected goal by Richarlison in stoppage time could have earned the Blues one of their most-precious points of the season. Frank Lampard’s side weren’t at the races for long periods but they dug deep to claw themselves back into this one.
This match felt like a huge opportunity for Everton but you’re never going to achieve to amount to much if you can’t string two results together. In the pre-match press conference ahead of this game, Blues boss Frank Lampard had spoken about the need to keep spirits up because the nature of a relegation battle ensured you were inevitably going to suffer setbacks and his team were not going to have to win their eight remaining fixtures to stay up.
However, this was surely one of the games in the run-in that will have fallen into the winnable category with the opportunity to record back-to-back Premier League victories for the first time since September after the hard-working 1-0 success against Manchester United 11 days earlier.
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Leicester City though, who before kick-off represented opponents who would account for 25% of Everton’s remaining games, provided a rather different proposition to the under-achieving Red Devils, something else that Lampard acknowledged in his programme notes.
He said: “I hate an up and down pattern. Winning a few games on the spin completely changes the picture and the mood around an entire club transforms. It is more complicated than just saying we need to back up the United performance, though. The Premier League asks different questions of you in every game and we have to find the answers against Leicester.”
Unlike the previous match where Everton were able to run and harry against a star-studded but dysfunctional opponent, the likes of Allan and Fabian Delph found the action largely bypassing them here as Brendan Rodgers’ side got their noses in front early on and were able to stroke the ball around at will for prolonged periods while their hosts seemed rushed and often fraught in their actions.
Lampard’s men have been fortunate on many occasions in recent weeks that Burnley have spurned all their chances when playing before them but while long-suffering Evertonians again find themselves sweating on what happens at Turf Moor 24 hours after their own fixture, thanks to their Brazilian’s late strike, the Clarets can’t now dump them into the bottom three, even if they defeat Southampton.
