Like the rest of English football, Everton are facing an enforced break after this weekend’s fixtures were postponed following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. But opinion remains divided as to whether this scenario might help or hinder Frank Lampard’s side.
Six games into the Premier League season, the Blues are still waiting for their first victory but they are unbeaten in their last four matches and produced an encouraging display to draw 0-0 with neighbours Liverpool at Goodison Park last time out. Although many of sports have resumed action this weekend after being called off on Friday, unlike after the last previous death of a monarch, King George VI in 1952 when the full programme continued, football’s authorities took the decision to postpone all of this weekend’s domestic fixtures in all home nations of the United Kingdom as a mark of respect.
Everton’s trip to Arsenal scheduled for Sunday is therefore off but next weekend’s games – including the Blues home match with David Moyes’ West Ham United set for Sunday September 18 – could also be under threat as large numbers of police officers from across the country prepare to descend on London for the late Queen’s state funeral. With an international break following that, the Blues face the potential prospect of a 29-day gap between matches from the Merseyside Derby on September 3 to their visit to Southampton on October 1.
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Might Lampard’s men benefit from this unexpected time off or not? Speaking on the Royal Blue podcast, the ECHO’s Everton correspondent Joe Thomas thinks so but his colleague Everton reporter Adam Jones disagrees.
Thomas said: “I think Everton benefit from this to be perfectly honest. I think if you look at the squad at the minute, one of the things that Frank Lampard has spoken about consistently throughout the summer is the trouble caused by the length at which the transfer window went into the start of the season.
“The Derby was the first game after the window closed and this gives Frank the opportunity for two things: one is that he’s got a squad that has been strengthened at the back end of the transfer window, the likes of Idrissa Gueye, Neal Maupay and James Garner, he can continue with the integration of them into the squad and get them up to speed in terms of fitness and tactics without the pressure of the matchday scenario.
“Also you’ve got the injured players and those on the brink of a return, Dominic Calvert-Lewin in particular, who you would imagine may well be in a position to play against West Ham with the Arsenal game being off and if West Ham is cancelled you’d certainly imagine he’d be back for Southampton, it gives you almost a month to work on his fitness. There’s also the likes of Tom Davies and Amadou Onana who have played well in recent games but are still getting themselves up to match fitness and Allan, if he’s ever to play for Everton, any serious role for Everton, you’d imagine it’s going to help him because he picked up a knock before Fleetwood which felt like an obvious game for him to play in.”
Thomas added: “With the Jordan Pickford injury, we knew he was going to miss two games, you would think, judging on the wording, that he’d probably be back for Southampton or be very, very close. From multiple perspectives this is actually an opportunity for Frank Lampard to sit back and take stock over what we’ve learned from these first six games of the Premier League season and how can we make sure we’re in a better place going forward.
“While we all came away from the Derby rather positive, from the outside looking in and without a win, Arsenal was always going to be a very difficult game and will remain so even if they have a fully-fit squad by the time they come to play them. West Ham at home won’t necessarily be easy either as they face another club that’s under a lot of pressure but if Everton miss out these next two games, once they come back from the international break they enter a run of fixtures that is quite significantly kinder and Southampton away might be the chance for Lampard to have a fully fit or a much stronger and fully integrated side and he might be able to get over that hoodoo and get the first win to get that monkey off his back at an earlier stage which might ease the pressure as well.”
However, Jones took an opposite stance and said: “I don’t think we can pretend that Southampton away has been particularly kind to Everton in the past. We’ve maybe got a couple of wins there but it’s not been a happy hunting ground for Everton in the past.
“I disagree to be honest, I think the momentum that Everton would have had from that Merseyside Derby is much more beneficial than anything else right now because whenever this game does get rescheduled, the odds are that Everton are going to have injuries for that as well. I’m not ruling out Everton not picking up injuries even while not playing games over this break.
“The amount of injuries that Everton pick up training, the fact that Everton are going to be in more training, probably is the worst thing right now! I just think this would have been a great time, when you talk about integrating players into the squad the best way to integrate players into a squad is to actually get them playing.
“I think Amadou Onana is a great example of that. The fact that he came on for his couple of substitute appearances and maybe looked like he wasn’t up to the speed of the game but as soon as he was starting games, that’s when he was putting in his really strong performances.”
Jones added: “You can only do so much on the training pitch and we’re going to lose that wave of momentum and positivity that we had from the Liverpool game. Granted, we might have been beaten by Arsenal but West Ham at home is an easier game to me than Southampton away – I’m talking like it’s already been postponed but in all likelihood it probably will be – but that’s an easier fixture on paper and Southampton have started the season quite well and beat Chelsea at home quite recently and didn’t put in a bad performance at all against Manchester United either so I don’t think that’s a necessarily easy fixture at all.
“I think it’s got a real chance of backfiring on Everton a little bit. We’ve had this sort of thing over the Covid fixtures getting postponed and people were saying ‘it’s great that we had this postponed because we had x and y unavailable’ but then the fixture came back around and we lose it anyway.
“I just think it’s impossible to tell but in my opinion, I’d have rather played and kept some momentum up. It took Everton a while to build up this sort of head of steam and to have it instantly chopped off at the knees as it were, I’m not a fan of it personally.”
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