The sobering reality over Sean Dyche’s half-time pep talk to his players, telling them that Everton “don’t know how to win” is that there is a strong element of truth to the Burnley manager’s damning words and he was only echoing what long-suffering Blues fans have feared for a long time now. On a wet and windswept night at Turf Moor, it was clear that man-for-man there was much more individual talent within the visitors’ ranks but as a collective unit they remain woefully less than the sum of their parts and a maddening habit for pressing the self-destruct button through costly individual errors is now seriously threatening to culminate a miserable season with the club’s first relegation since 1951.
This current Burnley side are no vintage Clarets and are one of the most technically-limited outfits in the Premier League. In the build-up to Wednesday night’s fixture, colleagues from other titles who have reported on Dyche’s side on a regular basis were laying it on thick to this correspondent about how bad Burnley are and how they’ve had their mini-revival but were now back in a slump. Even before the game kicked-off, it sounded eerily familiar to Norwich City in January – the defeat that cost Rafa Benitez his job.
Since then, Everton have completed an unwanted hat-trick of losing to teams in the bottom three after their reversals at Newcastle United and now Burnley. These were three golden opportunities to put breathing space between them and rivals in the drop zone but on each occasion it has been the Blues’ opponents, not them, who have risen to the occasion.
