Announcement on PA at Villa Park only highlighted issue Everton and Sean Dyche must face up to
It wasn’t always like this...
Long before Jurgen Klopp coined his phrase “Mentality Monsters” across Stanley Park for his Liverpool players, Everton were once the best team in the land, both physically and psychologically. Back in 1985, the Blues secured the League Championship by what was a record-breaking 13-point margin with a 90-point haul that was also the highest total at the time and in an era in which English clubs – including Aston Villa – had won seven of the previous eight European Cup finals before that year, Howard Kendall’s side looked set to conquer the continent the following season having also lifted the European Cup-Winners’ Cup.
Reflecting on their glory years on the BBC’s Match of the Eighties, Everton’s talismanic striker Andy Gray insisted: “We never thought we could lose a game of football. We always knew if we scored first, we would win, it was as easy as that.
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“We had so much confidence, if we didn’t score first, we’d still score two.”
Sean Dyche, the Blues’ eighth manager in as many years under Farhad Moshiri, has never once come from behind to win a Premier League game with the club. He’s not the first to endure such a fate though as the same pitfall befell Marco Silva during his 18-month stint in charge of Everton.
The Portuguese coach looked like a broken man by the time his stint on Merseyside had chewed him up and spat him about, but he’s been able to rebuild his reputation in this country in the more tranquil surroundings of the banks of the Thames at Fulham, another historic club (the oldest professional outfit in London having been formed in 1879, just one year after Everton), but one that has never won a major honour.
Under Moshiri though, even the best managers in the business have regularly been made to look like patsies by various incarnations of Blues teams. Even the great Carlo Ancelotti, who has subsequently returned to Real Madrid to add another couple of La Liga titles and Champions League successes to his glittering CV, oversaw a collapse that saw his team nosedive in the 2020/21 season from being second in the table on Boxing Day to finishing 10th and missing out on European football.
Nobody expects Dyche sides to play the kind of football that Ancelotti now enjoys with his Galacticos in the Spanish capital – coolly able to add Kylian Mbappe to the mix this summer to a club that had just lifted its 15th European Cup – and the current Everton manager himself as admitted: “why fight the box you’re put in?” However, what you do expect with Dyche and his teams is a certain degree of resoluteness.
ANSWERS NEEDED: Joe Thomas' video reaction on YouTube
Although the Blues are still yet to recover from a goal down to win a Premier League match under Dyche, they avoided defeat in 24 of the first 26 games under him in which they scored first, winning 18 of them and only being beaten by champions Manchester City and West Ham United. However, they have now lost the last three Premier League fixtures in which they scored first – to title-chasing Arsenal on the final day of last season and then to Bournemouth and Aston Villa despite being 2-0 ahead in both.
After coming from 2-0 down to beat Wimbledon in their first ‘Great Escape’ from relegation on the final day of a Premier League season in 1994, Everton had to wait another 27 years until they repeated the trick at Goodison Park against Watford in 2017. In terms of throwing away 2-0 leads though, over 40 years elapsed between it happening at Goodison in league games, as, after a game with Sheffield United in 1975 (the second time that season after Carlisle United), it didn’t happen again until West Ham United triumphed against Roberto Martinez’s men in 2016.
The current crop have just done it in consecutive fixtures.
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Everton have been part of the English football elite almost continuously (save for four seasons in the second tier in 1930/31 and 1951-54) since the beginning as the only founder members of the Football League in 1888 (before any of the current ‘Big Six’ were involved) and the Premier League in 1992 to be ever-presents in the latter. Villa’s 213 league meetings against Everton is a domestic record with the West Midlands outfit’s 111 seasons in top flight football second only to the Blues’ current haul of 122 and a statue of their club’s patriarch, William McGregor, the founding father of the former now stands outside Villa Park.
Villa’s recent revival and elevation to the Champions League for the first time – they previously only competed for the European Cup when they won it in 1981/82 – is an example to Everton that better times can still lie ahead if the club is run properly. While the Blues certainly wouldn’t want to endure a period of exile in the Championship like Villa suffered, the move to the new stadium next year can prove a game-changer both on and off the pitch.
First, they’ve got to get there intact though and right now there seems to be plenty of emotional baggage attached to this venerable but vulnerable football institution. Shortly before kick-off, travelling Evertonians cheered when the earlier results were announced on the Villa Park PA system, and it was confirmed that Nottingham Forest had won 1-0 at Anfield.
MORE FRUSTRATION: Chris Beesley's video reaction on YouTube
But as much as that scoreline brought a smile to Blues’ faces before their own misery set in again, it also brings into a focus a more sobering fact closer to home. Taking away the various anomalies that occurred behind closed doors due to coronavirus restrictions, Forest have now beaten Liverpool on their own turf in front of fans a quarter of a century more recently than Everton.
This was only the East Midlanders’ third visit there during that time, but the Blues have been back some 27 times when there’s been a crowd since Kevin Campbell’s strike secured them the three points back in 1999.
That’s some kind of mental block for a whole generation of different Everton teams. Look at Fabian Hurzeler, 31, the first Premier League gaffer to be younger than the competition himself, breezing in with a 3-0 win at Goodison Park and getting himself Manager of the Month for August at another trophyless but upwardly mobile outfit Brighton & Hove Albion.
There’s no way such an individual could have enjoyed such a fruitful honeymoon period at the Blues. Everton had to wait until their sixth fixture of last season to taste victory in the Premier League on September 23 at Brentford and unfortunately the current campaign has begun in a similar fashion.
Nobody was envisaging all this again but after three straight years of drama in which the club’s Premier League status was only secured in the final home game of the first two and the third brought two separate points deductions, those who have Everton’s best intentions at heart need to try and see the bigger picture right now at a time of yet more suffering. It’s managerial churn that has brought the Blues to the precarious position they currently occupy but whatever you think of the current incumbent of the Goodison Park hotseat, while others panic, he has a proven track record of being a steady hand on the tiller when it comes to riding the storm and guiding this troubled ship into calmer waters.
Ultimately, ALL managers are judged upon their results though. Dyche, the man who secured survival last season by finishing with five consecutive home wins, will know that the tide needs to turn... and quickly.