With Sean Dyche closing in on the Everton manager’s job, what he said about the Blues players when last facing them just nine months ago presents a significant issue.
Even Henry VIII never made it to a seventh choice, but with Farhad Moshiri having chopped and changed his way through six managers in as many years at Everton, he now looks set to turn to Dyche, a man whose image mocked up as the 16th century tyrant king still adorns the sign of a pub in Burnley.
Curiously, Dyche, of course, was the man who for the majority of last season, was doing his utmost to send the Blues down, given that with Norwich City and Watford both looking doomed, he was manager of their main relegation rivals Burnley. The Clarets spurned numerous opportunities throughout the campaign to dump Frank Lampard’s side into the drop zone, but when they came from behind late on to defeat them 3-2 in dramatic fashion at Turf Moor on April 6, in a fixture originally planned for Boxing Day when Rafael Benitez was still in charge but postponed due to Covid cases, the tide appeared to be turning, leaving many Evertonians with an impending sense of doom.
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However, rather than prove to be the start of a great escape, Everton’s 1-0 home win over Manchester United just three days later coupled with his own side’s 2-0 defeat at basement club Norwich 24 hours on saw the gap between the clubs move back to four points with eight games to go, and Dyche’s nine-and-a-half year Burnley reign came to a surprising and abrupt halt on Good Friday as Scouser Mike Jackson was put in caretaker charge. A new manager bounce from the former Tranmere Rovers boss saw the Clarets take 10 points out of the next 12 and for a time leave Lampard’s Everton in the bottom three before the Blues eventually rallied to secure their top-flight status with a 3-2 comeback win over Crystal Palace in their final home game.
Although for a time their gamble appeared like it might pay off, the Burnley board’s decision to dispense with Dyche was hugely controversial and widely criticised, with BBC Sport’s chief football writer Phil McNulty, formerly of the ECHO, describing it as “blind panic”. It had been a season of strife for the Clarets with the victory over Everton just their fourth in the Premier League that term but you’d have thought that Dyche of all managers would have accrued some credit in the bank for his past achievements.
Which brings us to the aforementioned pub in the shadow of Turf Moor, renamed from The Princess Royal to The Royal Dyche with his face superimposed onto the distinctive hat and costume of England’s infamous six-times married Tudor monarch. After steering the Clarets to two Premier League promotions and even European qualification for the first time in over half a century, he was an intimidating ruler within his own fiefdom in a manner not dissimilar to Henry VIII, and after his shock departure last spring, bosses of the hostelry that bore his name confirmed there were no plans to change as nobody could undo the good work he had done, how far he had taken the club and how he had “put Burnley FC back on the map”,
While Dyche has not been a perennial candidate during Everton’s all-too-frequent managerial searches under Moshiri, akin to someone like Vitor Pereira, the ‘bad penny’ whose live telephone call to Sky Sports last January ahead of Lampard’s appointment provided excruciating ‘car crash’ television (for the record, the Portuguese coach has just taken up a new role at Rio de Janeiro-based club Flamengo), he has been linked to the Blues in the past. Back in the autumn of 2017 when his stock was at its highest – as he was on his way to guiding Burnley to what would be a seventh-place finish – Dyche’s name was in the frame to replace Ronald Koeman but when asked about the speculation he claimed there had been “no contact” and Moshiri, having hired the Dutchman as a box office name to compete in England’s north west, a region he dubbed “the new Hollywood of football”, would ultimately turn to another salt of the earth Englishman in the shape of Sam Allardyce.
Like ‘Big Sam’, you know what you’re getting with Dyche and his straightforward, no-nonsense approach, whether you like that or not. His Burnley teams almost always deployed the same formation (4-4-2) and the players, regardless of the fluctuations of form, were well-drilled to know their roles inside out.
Even though Burnley historically falls within the same Lancashire County Palatine as its big city neighbours in Liverpool and Manchester, it’s a world away in many respects against the backdrop of the mills and hills and while they possess a proud old football club, expectations were understandably far more modest in what was the Premier League’s lowest catchment area compared to the more metropolitan elites like Everton, even though they have fallen far behind both their rivals from across Stanley Park and the pair from down the East Lancs Road. Dyche was a big fish in a small pond at Turf Moor but for all his experience, would he be seen as a suitable candidate to lead the Blues to the new stadium?
Given Everton’s perilous position though, right now they just need someone who can ensure they’re still a Premier League club when they move to their 52,888 capacity future home at Bramley-Moore Dock. The search to replace Lampard has been thorough and is understood to included having flown Marcelo Bielsa in from South America. But Dyche always seemed the obvious candidate in the circumstances – certainly in the eyes of this correspondent – and other than a potential snobbery from advocates of ‘The School of Science’ and the Blues can’t afford to be football aristocrats reflecting on past glories but increasingly antiquated in the modern world, he always seemed the lowest-risk option.
Perhaps the biggest elephant in the room though will be the revelation that Dyche disclosed after Burnley’s 3-2 triumph over Everton last season, a fixture that proved to be his last in charge at Turf Moor and the final three points of his tenure when during a half-time pep talk as his side trailed 2-1, he’d told the Clarets players that this Blues side “don’t know how to win”. Given that in 29 of their 38 Premier League games under Lampard they didn’t, Dyche may well have a point but as it also remains a huge issue, just what will he do and say now he’s set to take charge of such a bunch himself?
Over to you Sean… Good luck.
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