Your evening Everton headlines on Sunday, November 13.
Everton have six weeks to decide their destiny as Frank Lampard challenge becomes clear
The World Cup break comes at a good time for Everton.
Sometimes, after a bad run of results, another game emerging quickly on the horizon can be a good thing. It can present a new challenge to focus on, a cause to rally around and an opportunity to shift the narrative. But for Everton, at this moment in time, a break is needed.
Starting with the defeat to Leicester City, this week has been a catastrophe. First Tuesday, then Saturday - each provided a chance to inject some positivity into the next six weeks after disappointing results. Instead they found only more frustration and more injuries. Struggling to halt the momentum themselves, at least it has now been ended for them.
The break in the domestic calendar removes Frank Lampard, his backroom team and the players from the spotlight and offers a chance to properly analyse the first 15 games of the season - what went wrong, what went right, what needs to be done to improve. It offers a window to sensibly plot for January.
Joe Thomas has more, here.
'Wanted us out' - Everton icon made 'nasty' Liverpool demand and slammed Margaret Thatcher decision
Football these days is almost unrecognisable at times from how the game was in the 1980s.
The fundamentals remain the same of course - eleven against eleven - the ultimate aim being to get the round object into the rectangular thing. Everton annually finding a way to make a mess of their League Cup campaign.
But there have been seismic changes since the decade which arguably more than any other ushered in the all-singing, all-dancing globally marketed product we see today, some of them for the better. Supporters are generally much safer attending matches than they were back then, most weekends there are literally dozens of televised matches from all over the world for armchair fans to enjoy rather than the handful a season audiences had to be grateful for back then, and, from a player’s perspective, their shorts are more generously cut.
Yes, video, photographic and documentary evidence from the time makes clear that back then - way before the mass-produced kits which are rolled out in triplicate season after season, much to the anguish of harassed parents - most clubs had one set of shorts to last their squad for a season which, even before the repeated washing of them week after week, left little to the imagination and would not have looked out of place on a cage dancer in Ibiza. And, were it not for a team-mate coming to the rescue of the most successful captain in Everton’s history at a particularly critical juncture, they could potentially have scuppered one of the key triumphs which set in motion Goodison’s golden age.
Dan Kay has the full story, here.
READ NEXT:
- Rare Seamus Coleman moment sums up Everton misery as injury problems mount up
- Frank Lampard faced with worst possible Everton question after week from hell
-
What happened in two minutes of full-time drama in Everton loss to Bournemouth
-
Frank Lampard explains Anthony Gordon substitution and gives Everton injury update
-
Frank Lampard makes referees claim after controversial Bournemouth goal in Everton defeat
