Your morning Everton headlines for Monday, November 7.
The starting changes Everton could make for Bournemouth Carabao Cup tie
Frank Lampard is expected to make changes to his Everton side for Tuesday night’s Carabao Cup tie at Bournemouth but to just what extent might the Blues boss shuffle his pack?
Everton are already sweating on the fitness of Idrissa Gueye, Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Amadou Onana who all left the field injured at various points of Saturday night’s 2-0 home defeat to Leicester City and the trio are all expected to go for scans on Monday to examine the severity of their ailments.
The third-round match against the Cherries, which must be settled on the night, is the first of two long trips down to the Dorset coast in the space of four days for the Blues and Lampard could well delve deeper into a squad which he declared on Friday to be the strongest at his disposal since he came to the club.
Read the full story, here.
Everton have just ramped up the pressure on themselves at the worst possible time
A win against Leicester City on Bonfire Night could have elevated Everton into the top half of the Premier League and even above neighbours Liverpool but instead their 2-0 defeat – with Harvey Barnes’ late second goal ensuring the Foxes, who went into the fixture in the relegation zone, leapfrogged their hosts in the table – means that the Blues are now left looking over their shoulders ahead of the World Cup break.
Given the high stakes surrounding Everton’s two fixtures against Leicester at the back end of last season – they met twice in the space of just 19 days after the home game, originally scheduled for December 18, 2021, was twice postponed due to a coronavirus outbreak within Brendan Rodgers’ squad – this latest meeting was deemed by many to be the ‘least important’ of the two clubs’ trio of meetings this year. But while it’s true that Frank Lampard’s side picked up four crucial points towards survival from that brace of games in the spring, including a first Premier League away win since the previous August, the unprecedented nature of the calendar for the current campaign adds increasing pressure to this weekend’s loss.
It’s bad enough when any Premier League team has to go into an international break on the back of a bad result as they know there’s nothing they can do about it for a fortnight. But just as Leicester, who until their triumph at Goodison Park had been in the relegation zone since August, were eager to move away from the drop zone ahead of the six-week hiatus, Everton do not want to find themselves in or around the bottom three when the music stops ahead of the tournament in Qatar. After last season’s trauma that saw the Blues come disgustingly close to what would have been a first relegation in 71 years, only to save themselves with just one game to spare despite recording the joint lowest equivalent points total in the club’s history, they have kept their heads above water this term.
Read the full story, here.
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