Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville have blamed the players for Everton's current plight as the former Premier League pair slammed the Blues squad's display on Sky Sports.
The 1-0 home defeat to Wolverhampton Wanderers on Sunday was the Blues' eighth defeat in nine Premier League matches so far in 2022 and left them only outside of the relegation zone on goal difference.
Everton have taken just 22 points from 26 games, their lowest-ever tally at this stage of a Premier League season. And speaking on Monday Night Football, former Liverpool defender and boyhood Evertonian Jamie Carragher said: “I don’t think Evertonians believe they’re going to stay up. Their fixtures are horrific. The players have been an absolute disgrace.”
READ MORE: What sale of the Royal Liver Building means for Everton
MICHAEL BALL: What Frank Lampard must ask Everton's players ahead of Newcastle as style question raised
READ MORE: Frank Lampard could face tough Everton question we all now struggle to answer
Ex-Manchester United stalwart Gary Neville replied: “They look so flaky. The pressure is enormous given that they’re a big club.
“I know a few Everton fans and they’re thinking ‘We’re done.’ Who’s in that dressing room that’s going to lift them?”
The duo's sentiments reflected a piece produced only last Thursday by this correspondent who wrote that Everton's players must face the facts over seven managers employed by Farhad Moshiri and it is ultimately only them who can save themselves.
Given Carragher and Neville's remarks, we reproduce an updated version of that article again here in full:
Francis Lee, who experienced football as first a player and then a chairman once observed: “What other job is there where your entire livelihood depends on 11 daft lads?"
There was a certain gallows humour in the toilet roll millionaire’s remark about life at his beloved Manchester City in the pre-Abu Dhabi United Group era.
Back before they were bankrolled by sugar daddies from the UAE and started to be labelled “The Noisy Neighbours” by Sir Alex Ferguson, City were the loveable but hapless local rivals in the shadow of Manchester United.
City going down on the final day of the 1995/96 season after their midfielder Steve Lomas wasted time by taking the ball to the corner flag in the latter stages of a 2-2 draw at home to Liverpool when they should have been pushing for a winner (he’d even been given instructions to do so by manager Alan Ball, an Everton legend as a player, who had received incorrect information over what was required) summed up the chaos at Maine Road at the time.
Back then, Evertonians – with recent memories of their own club’s glory days – would quite rightly bristle at comparisons with their fellow blue-hued outfit from down the East Lancs Road.
A generation on and for all Farhad Moshiri’s great ambitions, the clubs are now poles apart.
They might both play in the Premier League – for now at least – but Everton and Manchester City operate in different football stratospheres.
Nobody at Goodison Park would kid themselves to think any different that the recent brouhaha over Everton not being awarded a penalty due to a VAR fiasco would not have received anywhere near the attention it did had it not impacted on a title race involving City and Liverpool.
Like Lee’s team in the mid-1990s though and indeed all football clubs, regardless of the fortunes that Moshiri has pumped into the Blues, they are ultimately utterly dependent of those 11 young men who take to the field.
In this instance it might be unfair to label them “daft lads” because when you have the privilege of sitting down and talking to Everton’s players as individuals, many of them are articulate, earnest and often brutally honest about their team’s performances and their own shortcomings.
However, they have to take responsibility and accountability for the dire situation that their club currently finds themselves in.
They are guided by others and many other mitigating factors can come into play but ultimately it is only those wearing the royal blue jersey who can win and lose games of football for the club.
This week Evertonians have been mourning the loss of their former manager Gordon Lee who took charge of the club back in January 1977.
Gavin Buckland’s book Boys from the Blue Stuff: Everton’s Rise To 1980s Glory recalls that before Lee’s appointment, the legendary Italy coach Enzo Bearzot, who would steer his country to World Cup glory in 1982, had put his hat into the ring for the Goodison Park vacancy.
In a follow-up article after the revelation, this correspondent spoke to World Soccer’s Italy correspondent Paddy Agnew, who recalled a meeting with Bearzot and his former Azzurri players in a Milan hotel.
Members of the 1982 squad were fawning around him but Agnew said: “There was huge affection for Bearzot and Gabriele Oriali said to him, ‘We’ll always be grateful to you, you changed all of our lives, you were fantastic.’
“Bearzot told them, ‘Look lads, I didn’t change anything. You won the World Cup, not me.’”
This wasn’t false modesty from a national hero, just a statement of fact.
Former director of football Marcel Brands might have made the cryptic “Is it only the players?” parting shot when confronted by an angry fan in Goodison’s Main Stand who had asked him if he was responsible for the recruitment of those on the pitch after the 4-1 defeat to Liverpool in December but it is Everton’s players alone who can get them out of their current trouble.
It’s been well-documented many times before that there has been plenty of woeful and wild recruitment on Moshiri’s watch both under Steve Walsh and Brands with many millions frankly squandered and we don’t need to reopen old wounds in that respect here.
But for all the questionable signings that the Blues have made since their Monaco-based owner first arrived in 2016, they actually still possess a playing squad of great pedigree.
The starting XI for the shambolic display at Tottenham Hotspur that in the end finished ‘just’ 5-0 because the hosts had been so dominant early on and were able to ease their foot off the pedal in the final half an hour, contained many top-class players.
Dominic Calvert-Lewin, Michael Keane and Jordan Pickford are all England internationals with the latter the long-time national team number one and now the most-capped Three Lions player in Everton history.
Olympic gold medallist Richarlison and Allan are both Brazil internationals.
Captain Seamus Coleman is also skipper for the Republic of Ireland while Donny van de Beek plays for the Netherlands.
Even among those in the team who have not played international football, there were the likes of Abdoulaye Doucoure, described by Frank Lampard as “one of the best midfielders in the Premier League of his type” and home-grown hero Anthony Gordon, currently one of the division’s brightest young prospects.
Despite the undoubted talent in the team, Everton’s most-decorated player Neville Southall was reluctant to point the finger of blame at them when I spoke to him in the aftermath of Rafa Benitez’s sacking.
The legendary former Blues goalkeeper stated that he himself had been part of a team that struggled woefully under Mike Walker but then was then galvanised under Joe Royle to win the FA Cup against Manchester United just a year after their final day ‘Great Escape’ against Wimbledon.
That was just one Everton manager though in the shape of the much-maligned Walker.
Lampard has now lost five of his six Premier League games in charge of the Blues.
He’s manager number seven under Mr Moshiri but they can’t all be wrong?
Roberto Martinez went on to land a job with a Belgium team number one in FIFA’s World Rankings.
Ronald Koeman coached the Dutch national team and then Barcelona with his penultimate game in charge of the Catalan giants and El Clasico fixture against Carlo Ancelotti’s Real Madrid.
Even Marco Silva is rebuilding his reputation with free-flowing football at runaway Championship leaders Fulham.
Despite their respective records at Goodison, which all have to go down as being failures, none of them are viewed as being ‘damaged goods’ by the football world at large.
There is more than enough talent in the current Everton squad, some of whom have played under most or even all of those bosses, to be comfortably halfway up the table at least.
They really should have qualified for Europe last season but having been in the dizzying heights of second place as late as Boxing Day, a late collapse, culminating with another 5-0 thrashing at Manchester City on the final day, saw them slump to finish 10 th .
At the time it was a major disappointment but what would Blues give for mid-table mediocrity now?
Points-wise, this is Everton’s lowest-ever tally at this stage of a Premier League season and their worst since their last relegation campaign way back in 1951.
They’re not cut adrift though and their destiny very much remains in their own hands.
These players need to start believing in themselves and delivering the goods in terms of getting points on the board after just two victories from their last 20 Premier League games.
They owe it to themselves, to Lampard and his staff and most of all to the long-suffering supporters who deserve so much better than this.
