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, the chaos and uncertainty that afflicts the club could be epitomised by reports linking them to Sean Dyche, a man whose image mocked up as the 16th century tyrant king still adorns the sign of a pub in Burnley.
An article in the Mirror claims the Blues – along with fellow strugglers Southampton who only appointed their manager Nathan Jones in November and ironically come to Goodison Park next Saturday – are eyeing moves for Dyche if they decide to make a change in the dugout.
With just one win in their last 12 matches – since their 2-1 comeback win at Southampton on October 1 – Everton have plummeted into the Premier League relegation zone and been knocked out of both domestic cup competitions, ensuring that the Saints’ visit to Merseyside is surely a ‘must win’ fixture if they are to revive their flagging fortunes and start trying to rescue what is increasingly looking like a season of disaster with the Blues currently on course for the lowest equivalent points total in their history and a first relegation in 72 years. Still three weeks shy of the first anniversary of his appointment, Frank Lampard remains in charge but for all his talk that the club were heading for the drop when he arrived, he’s a smart enough man to realise that results have not improved over his tenure and the present situation appears as bleak as it’s ever been.
Curiously, Dyche of course was the man who for the majority of last season, was doing his utmost to send Everton down given that with Norwich City and Watford both looking doomed, he was manager of the Blues’ main relegation rivals Burnley. The Clarets spurned numerous opportunities throughout the campaign to dump 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. Other than a potential snobbery from advocates of ‘The School of Science’, although in many ways the Blues can’t afford to be football aristocrats reflecting on past glories but increasingly antiquated in the modern world, another potential sticking point with Dyche might be the fact that, like Celtic manager Ange Postecoglou who has also been linked to the post in recent months, he’s a self-confessed boyhood Liverpool fan having admired the Reds from afar when growing up in Northamptonshire.
Perhaps the biggest elephant in the room though would 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 27 of their 36 Premier League games under Lampard to date they haven’t done, Dyche may well have a point but as it also remains a huge problem, just what would he do and say if he took charge of such a bunch himself?
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