Everton claims Sean Dyche has lost the dressing room are missing the point

Everton’s humiliating 6-0 thrashing to Chelsea was painful enough but beleaguered Blues must hope that manager Sean Dyche hasn’t lost something even more damaging – the dressing room.

Like that age old question about “how big a club is?” (do you measure trophies/when they were won/number of fans etc), the concept of having possession of the dressing room is one of football’s great intangibles but an inability to quantify or prove it doesn’t make it any less of a reality. Relinquishing such control can be a serious matter for any manager and the kind of blow it is difficult to recover from.

Romelu Lukaku claimed Roberto Martinez lost the Everton dressing room before he was sacked for what in these current leanest of times seems like the dizzying heights of finishing 11th. Some two decades ago, similar things were being said about David Moyes but he went on to make a mockery of such suggestions and enjoy his best days at the club.

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Having got themselves safe with a 3-1 victory over Tottenham Hotspur on Good Friday 2004, the Blues failed to win any of their last six matches, culminating with a 5-1 drubbing at Manchester City on the final day of the season that condemned them to 17th place with just 39 points – a number that at the time was the club’s lowest equivalent total although it was subsequently matched in 2021/22 and lowered further in 2022/23 when Everton avoided their first relegation in 72 years by a single goal. Following their shellacking at the hands of Kevin Keegan’s pre-oil money Citizens (Sheikh Mansour’s gargantuan chequebook wouldn’t arrive for another four years), the whispering campaign was out to suggest that the Blues’ young Scottish manager had “lost the dressing room” but for Moyes the darkest hour proved to be the one before dawn.

Despite selling their boy wonder Wayne Rooney that summer, Everton bounced back to finish the following campaign in fourth place to qualify for the Champions League for the only time, above competition winners Liverpool, with what remains their highest Premier League finish in 32 years of the competition. The current crop can surely only dream of such dramatic turnarounds going into the club’s final season at Goodison Park in 2024/25 but the way they played – or didn’t – at Stamford Bridge has got plenty of tongues wagging among ‘The Toffees’ as the incumbent gaffer likes to call them.

Social media was awash with concerned Evertonians asking that most awkward of posers about Dyche and while he doesn’t bother with such platforms himself, the 52-year-old has always maintained that he respects the right of a fanbase who have followed this once venerable football institution through thin and thinner in recent years in continued great numbers, to question him. It was perhaps telling though that one supporter, while not the most eloquent but stating their case with the kind of passion you’d expect by the bucketful from a follower of this team who has endured so much misery, leapt to the Blues boss’ defence.

While their statement requires more asterisks than this season’s Premier League table to be included here, they wrote: “Stop saying he’s lost the dressing room. Some of these c***s have done this under every manager. “They’re s********s who don’t give a f**k about Everton. I’m not excusing Dyche but when the f**k do we point the finger at the players?”

It’s the kind of earthy, industrial language that might get you into hot water with a referee but behind all the ‘effing and jeffing’, there’s actually a very good point here. As always in football, it’s the man in the dugout who has to carry the can and ultimately loses his job but this Frankenstein’s monster of a squad, created by Farhad Moshiri’s eight appointments in as many years has been guilty of repeating such collapses on numerous occasions, leading to a toxic cycle of managerial churn.

You cannot repeat this process indefinitely and expect things to improve. As Dyche said in his pre-match press conference for this fixture: “We should be on 35 points and I would be getting measured differently, myself and the team and the players and the club in spite of having a tough run.”

Admittedly 35 points is no lofty tally but given the paltry totals of the previous two seasons and the extreme belt-tightening that Financial Fair Play rules have forced Everton into, ensuring there was – unlike Nottingham Forest – clearly no on-field advantage from their breaches, how can anyone genuinely claim this crisis club could have attracted to do any better in such trying circumstances than Dyche? The football might be a far cry from the halcyon days of ‘The School of Science’ but this is the medicine required to come through such a bout of severe sickness to survive.

There was an air of inevitability that the game was up against Chelsea as soon as the first of Cole Palmer’s goals hit the back of the net. Everton have still yet to come from behind to win a Premier League game under Dyche and that was a statistic that also dogged Marco Silva during his 18-month reign as barely six months after finishing eighth, he departed with the team in the relegation zone.

Even European football’s most-decorated manager Carlo Ancelotti, who has picked up silverware in all of the continent’s ‘big five’ domestic divisions and lifted the Champions League a record four times, saw his Blues side plummet from second spot on Boxing Day to finish the season in 10th. Too often Everton’s players have gone hiding in these times of strife but one at least who always comes out and fronts up is James Tarkowski.

Speaking in the Stamford Bridge tunnel after his team had been hit for six, he told the ECHO: “We’ve let the gaffer down – him and his staff and everyone at the football club who give us everything to perform on a matchday. It’s embarrassing for us and I can only apologise to the fans, they spend their money to come and watch us and have travelled down on a Monday night.”

The 31-year-old, who added: “It’s on us just as players” did offer a crumb of comfort to allay the fears we’ve discussed here when he said: “We’ve tried to give our all in every game for this football club.” Everyone who has Everton’s best interests at heart must hope that Tarkowski is correct when it comes to that final point.

When he first walked into the club, Dyche himself admitted that he’s a “Marmite manager” in that he divides opinion. However, regardless of what individual squad members may or may not think of his methods, given how high the stakes are when it comes to the survival of a football club who has spent more seasons in the top flight than any other, who is the only founder member of both the Football League and Premier League to be ever-presents in the latter and who, despite their current record-breaking drought, has lifted major trophies across nine separate decades – a feat of longevity that only Manchester United and neighbours Liverpool can better – this is no time for anyone to down tools.