There’s a lot wrong with Everton right now but there’s also a lot wrong with what some people are saying about them, namely criticising Jordan Pickford. As someone who was at Selhurst Park on Sunday to witness that horror show first hand, I can tell you I wish more of Frank Lampard’s players shared their goalkeeper’s passion and concern.
Given that he's England number one, intense scrutiny seems to go with the territory for Pickford and unfortunately for the player himself and Everton as his club, it always seems like somebody somewhere is ready to nit-pick at some aspect of his performances.
Evertonians have become accustomed to being lectured at in a hectoring manner by the vast legions of pundits with connections across Stanley Park – especially after Farhad Moshiri went against fan opinion to make the controversial appointment of former Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez last summer – and the latest talking head to find a (non-footballing) characteristic about him to chime against is Stephen Warnock. Speaking on The Football Show on Sky Sports, he said: “I wouldn’t want to play in front of Jordan Pickford because I’d just be thinking: ‘Please be quiet. The way you’re acting.’ The way he goes about things, he’d drive me insane. There’s a way of doing it. He saves a shot and has a go at people for letting a shot come in at goal. You’re a goalkeeper. Do your job. Save the ball.
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“Don’t moan at people for getting shots away but there’s a way of telling people. ‘You’ve got to be tighter, you’ve got to be more organised.’ His is aggressive every time he comes out, he’s shouting at things. He’s just so animated for me, whenever I see him, I think there’s an error coming, or you’re out of control in what you’re doing.”
Let’s just review some elements of Warnock’s soliloquy.
“You’re a goalkeeper. Do your job. Save the ball.”
How patronising can you get?
So Everton’s defenders should just wave Crystal Palace’s attacking players through and Pickford should be glad of some action? The last two goals on Sunday were tap-ins, with the fourth coming after the Everton keeper and saved well from Conor Gallagher. If I was Pickford, I’d be tearing a strip out of the team-mates in front of me as well for the lack of protection offered.
“He’s just so animated for me, whenever I see him, I think there’s an error coming, or you’re out of control in what you’re doing.”
So being ‘animated’ is now perversely seen as some kind of negative attribute in football? Behave! I’ll repeat my earlier point that I wish more of this current Everton team showed that thet care, like Pickford does. Many of those long-suffering Blues supporters, who had to get up in the middle of the night to make it down to south London for a 12:30pm Sunday kick-off, wear their hearts on their sleeve when it comes to their football club and I’m sure they’d rather have players who possess a similar devotion to the cause than passive mercenaries going through the motions.
The second part of Warnock’s sentence is perhaps the biggest myth at all about Pickford, the unsubstantiated, intangible stick with which to beat him. Thinking that there’s a mistake on the way. Well when it arrives, I’m sure all his haters will gleefully pile on but until then they should keep their mouths shut.
Like all of us, he has made mistakes in the past. His errors are magnified because he’s an international football and are highlighted greater still because of the position on the field he plays in. It’s obvious that fans of Blues and Reds alike and Pickford himself will never forget the moment he misjudged Virgil van Dijk’s mishit shot in front of the Kop to allow Divock Origi a fluke goal to win a Merseyside Derby deep into stoppage time in December 2018.
It will remain a cross to bear for the 28-year-old for the rest of his career but it doesn’t mean that he’s liable to do it again anytime soon. In what has been the most wretched top-flight season in Everton’s entire 134-year history in the Football League so far, Pickford has actually been one of their most-consistent performers. Like all keepers, there will be opposition goals you could dissect and question whether he should have done better, but as he’s matured over the past couple of years, the bloopers have largely been eradicated from his game.
As for the last bit about supposedly being “out of control,” this smacks of harping back almost 18 months on to an obsession over Pickford’s challenge on Virgil van Dijk. In the second Merseyside Derby at Goodison Park in 2020 forced to be played without fans, the big Dutch centre-back had shown he was no angel himself by setting the tone for the afternoon by leaving his foot in on both Dominic Calvert-Lewin and James Rodriguez in the first 10 minutes. The after effects of the challenge on the latter proved to be the start of a series of niggles that would hamper the Colombian’s season at Everton.
Van Dijk would suffer an anterior cruciate ligament injury, something nobody wants to see, but while Pickford’s tackle on him – unpunished because of an anomaly in the laws of the game – was wild, the pitchfork-wielding, lynch mob reaction of some, including certain members of the Press, who should have known much better, was even wilder.
Unfortunately it seems that many don’t let facts get in the way of what they see as a ‘good’ Jordan Pickford knocking story. During last summer’s European Championships, a myth was perpetuated by certain observers, including Warnock’s former Liverpool team-mate Jamie Carragher, that the goalkeeper only played well for England.
In reality, Pickford was in fine form for Everton in the final third of the 2020/21 season, producing a string of quality performances. Starting with the 2-0 win over Liverpool at Anfield, Pickford never dropped below a score of 6 in the ECHO’s player ratings in the 12 matches he finished. He achieved two scores of 9 in this period (versus Liverpool and Aston Villa at home) plus five scores of 8 (against Southampton, West Bromwich Albion, Chelsea, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Manchester City).
This of course didn’t fit the popular narrative though. Even after Pickford collected the Golden Glove award at the Euros for the goalkeeper with the most clean sheets, many sections of the southern media have spent considerable periods of the current campaign calling for Arsenal’s Aaron Ramsdale – who misses England’s upcoming friendlies against Switzerland and Ivory Coast later this month through a muscle injury – to displace him in the side.
All this despite Pickford – who was also a penalty hero at the last World Cup – hardly putting a foot wrong while on Three Lions duty and being one of Gareth Southgate’s most-trusted lieutenants. He now has 42 caps for his country, that’s more than any other Everton player has won with England while at the club, and deserves more respect because as impressive as Ramsdale may have been at times this term for the Gunners, his international experience to date consists of being in between the sticks for a 10-0 romp against San Marino last November.
Whether it’s pundits with Anfield connections, London-based scribes or the Newcastle United fans who threw their inflatable dinosaurs on to the Goodison Park turf in disgust after Alex Iwobi’s winning goal against their side – on a night in which their Sunderland nemesis didn’t even play – there’s an awful lot of people with plenty to say about Everton’s keeper. However, as Neville Southall told me when Pickford was getting stick a couple of years ago : “If it was someone like Peter Schmeichel criticising you you'd perhaps think 'fair enough' but I wouldn't lose any sleep over the others.”
That’s the same Neville Southall who was the best goalkeeper in the world when he played for the Blues and the same Neville Southall who would routinely give a tongue-lashing to the back four in front of him, with his team-mates taking it on the chin. Come to think of it, Schmeichel himself, one of the greatest goalkeepers of the Premier League era, was no stranger to a verbal volley towards his own defenders either.
This Everton team do not need mollycoddling. They need to face up to real peril they are in. Crystal Palace was of course an FA Cup tie but with just 25 points taken from 27 Premier League games so far, they can’t be producing any more displays like that during the run-in as they battle to stay in the division. Frank Lampard has tried to exude a degree of calmness over their situation but even the Blues boss questioned whether his team had the necessary ‘b*******’ after their latest capitulation, and Pickford should be cheered not chastised for taking to task those in front of him as well.
