Everton suffered from adopting a misleading tactical approach which wasn’t as it seemed at Tottenham Hotspur and Frank Lampard needs to take his share of the blame along with the players.
That’s the verdict of Everton author Gavin Buckland following the team's shambolic showing in a 5-0 defeat.
He told the ECHO's Royal Blue podcast : “I think we spoke about the Manchester City game as being a sort of a template for how to play for the rest of the season – 4-3-3 and keep it tight and don’t give the opposition space but at the same time be flexible enough when you do have the ball to move forward.
“We did that against City in the first half in particular and against ‘weaker’ teams – for want of a better word – you’d hope to be on the offensive a bit more.
“I was surprised with the way we set up (at Tottenham). I wasn’t surprised with the team sheet (one change from the previous Premier League fixture), I was looking at it and thought, ‘that looks alright’.
“The problem was it looked like 4-3-3 but it wasn’t that in reality, it was more like 4-2-3-1 with Abdoulaye Doucoure playing a sort of strange 8 to 10 role which is not his game anyway.
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“If you’re going to do that, you’d put van de Beek in that role.
“As we’ve seen against City, Doucoure is good at picking the ball up at the edge of the area and driving forward. It’s not his game to pick the ball up outside the opposition area.
“What that did was it left space between our two defensive midfielders and the flanks for the opposition to move into or as what happened, our full-backs to move into and left the space behind them which two of the goals came from and one or two other skirmishes.
“So although the players were absolutely inept, apart from one or two exceptions, I don’t think the way that Frank set them up helped at all.
“I was looked at the start and thinking ‘something is wrong here’ and it struck me, we weren’t playing 4-3-3 whatsoever, we were playing 4-2-3-1.”
Buckland also believes Lampard also needs to be careful when it comes to digging out his players in public.
Asked by host Adam Jones who was to blame for Monday night’s debacle, he said: “You’ve got to blame everybody haven’t you?
“The manager for being naïve in the way he set up. He spoke after the game about allowing Spurs space behind the defence, well in many respects his tactics had sort of encouraged that.
“I’d query the selection of Michael Keane. You get the impression with Michael that if he’s not feeling great he’s hardly going to help his confidence really.
“I also wonder whether it was well-known to the rest of the team if he was unwell because that’s not going to give them confidence is it?
“At least Mason Holgate gave him a wake-up call with a smack in the face, something that many remarked on social media, summed up our season in less than a second.
“Everybody has to take the blame, players and the manager.
“This maybe because of his standards as a player when he was a hugely-successful professional but Frank sometimes needs to temper some of his criticism of players because ultimately he’s the manager.
“You may be able to get away with it when you’re successful but when you’re at where Everton are at the moment – I wouldn’t say it’s blame shifting – but I think he probably needs to be careful in what he says because sometimes it sounds like he’s blaming the players and criticising the players when some of the bits are not necessarily due to their efforts or lack of effort.
“I think that’s a lesson learned for him, he’s done it after a couple of games, at Newcastle and Southampton he came out with some similar stuff.
“It’s great for the media, there are plenty of sound bites but he just needs to be careful when morale is low. There were some interesting comments from him after the game.”
