Predictably, outsiders have taken much longer to cotton on but Everton are a very different beast now than they were a year ago, but if one passage of play from the victory over West Ham United on Sunday summed that up it was James Tarkowski’s challenge on Michail Antonio that almost put the visiting striker into the front rows of the Lower Bullens.
It might not be a tackle that will ultimately resonate to quite the magnitude of Phil Neville’s brutal boneshaker on his former Manchester United team-mate Cristiano Ronaldo on a similar area of the Goodison Park turf back in 2008 but it demonstrated that the Blues are at long last, no longer a Premier League outfit to be trifled with.
With 90 seconds remaining of what had been a pretty turgid first half up until that point, Hammers’ right-back Vladimir Coufal, knocked a ball into the right wing channel for Antonio to run on to and while it initially looked like being a straight foot race between him and Everton left-back Vitalii Mykolenko, in came Tarkowski with a perfectly-timed firm but fair slide tackle that left Antonio rolling on the deck and the Blues man’s own Ukrainian international team-mate flinching to get out of the way. Back in September 2021, many Blues fans inside Goodison were complaining – with some justification – on another challenge on that side of the ground from Tarkowski, then playing for Burnley of course, on Richarlison which went unpunished but left the Brazilian injured.
