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Boom, Bust & Bad Medicine — 2017-18 Season Review

2017-18 may have offered few moments to savour but it will live long in the memory… hopefully as the nadir in a decade that has promised much but delivered very little

It began with an almost unbridled sense of optimism in pre-season and ended with the club at perhaps its lowest ebb since 2002. In between, Ronald Koeman's much-vaunted project was brought to a mercifully premature end, a highly-regarded long-time Blues servant struggled to get things back on an even keel, and, after two harrowing defeats in late November, Everton's hierarchy felt compelled to resort to hiring Sam Allardyce to dispel any threat of relegation.

2017-18 was almost completely forgettable in terms of entertainment or achievement on the pitch but no Evertonian is likely to forget a season that promised so much and yet consistently delivered frustration and disappointment on a painful scale.

Most of the platform from which Everton could finally mount a viable assault on the Champions League places or make a concerted effort to end 23 years without silverware in one of the domestic cups appeared to be coming together last summer.

After making an impressive start to life at Goodison Park, the bloom had come off the rose of Koeman's reign between September and mid-December 2016 with a poor run of form but he appeared to have got things moving in the right direction after that, particularly with regard to the Toffees' home form.

Winning 10 of his next 11 Premier League matches at Goodison and securing both a seventh-place finish and entry to the Europa League's group-stage qualifying rounds, it seemed as though Koeman had primed Everton for further progress in 2017-18. The spending spree that followed in fairly short order only seemed to reinforce that notion.

Sunderland's highly-regarded young goalkeeper, Jordan Pickford, and Ajax's captain, Davy Klaassen, arrived on the same June day for a combined outlay of £48.6m; Sandro Ramirez and Henry Onyekuru, young strikers aged 21 and 19 respectively were snapped up for £13m; promising young defender Michael Keane was drafted in for £25m before the prodigal son, Wayne Rooney, returned to Everton amid much fanfare.

If there was a nagging discomfort at the fees being doled out on some of those acquisitions, prices seemingly paid to get them in the door with the minimum of fuss or competition, the general feeling was that Everton were finally doing what needed to be done in a massively inflated market to get the players to rebuild the spine of the team.

That rampant optimism began to be tempered, however, once the Europa League campaign kicked off, the previous season's top scorer, Romelu Lukaku, was sold to Manchester United without an obvious replacement in the pipeline, and negotiations with Swansea City over midfielder Gylfi Sigurdsson started to drag out towards the kick-off to the new season.

The Koeman project crumbles

Even accounting for rustiness and a lack of proper pre-season preparation, Everton's grind through two qualifying rounds to make the group phase of the Europa League was an early indicator of the struggles to come, particularly when it came to moving the ball effectively, creating chances and scoring goals.

The Blues edged their way past unfancied MFK Ruzomberok by a solitary goal in each leg and needed a sublime goal out of nowhere by Sigurdsson — the Icelandic international had finally arrived in a club-record deal a few days earlier — to settle their nerves in the next round against Hajduk Split but the overall feeling was one of underwhelm mixed with fervent hopes that the club would fill the gaping hole left by Lukaku before the transfer window closed the following week.

In the Premier League, the positivity engendered by a narrow home win over Stoke City on the opening day and a misleading 1-1 draw at eventual runaway champions Manchester City quickly evaporated at Stamford Bridge where a dreadful Blues display ended in a routine 2-0 defeat.

The unease among supporters wasn't helped by the fact that the transfer deadline would come and go without the addition of a reliable goalscorer and only Nikola Vlasic, the young Croatian who had impressed for Split over the two legs in the Europa League, to show for the club's final efforts in the transfer market.

As it turned out, the result at Chelsea was the moment at which Everton's top-four charge and Koeman's tenure as manager effectively left the rails as he failed to get to grips with an admittedly daunting fixture list. Humbling defeats to Tottenham (0-3) at home and Atalanta (0-3) and Manchester United (0-4) away set the alarm bells ringing and although passage to the fourth round of the League Cup was booked thanks to a 3-0 win over Sunderland and Bournemouth were despatched thanks to the heroics off the bench from Koeman's former outcast, Oumar Niasse, the latter two results merely papered over the cracks.

Just as they had been during their worst spell during the former Southampton boss's first season in charge, Everton were toothless, directionless and lacking any discernible style of play and concern over the team's future under Koeman returned in the next Europa League group game against Apollon Limassol in which the Toffees threw away two badly-needed points by conceding a soft, late equaliser to the Cypriot side.

A home defeat to Burnley, an unconvincing 1-1 draw at Brighton and a shabby, undisciplined home defeat to Lyon pushed Evertonians and major shareholder Farhad Moshiri to the limits of their collective patience, with the next Premier League encounter against Arsenal proving to be the last straw.

Just as they did the season before, Wayne Rooney's opener, which harked back to his history-making strike as a 16-year-old against the same opposition in 2003, had the potential to be a catalyst for Koeman and his Everton team to kickstart their campaign with a home win over the Gunners.

Unfortunately, after Arsenal had turned the match on its head, Idrissa Gueye was sent off for a second bookable offence and the Blues collapsed, eventually going down a humiliating 5-2 defeat with Moshiri watching on from the Director's Box next to a shell-shocked Bill Kenwright.

The result left Everton sitting in the relegation zone for the first time in 12 years and it left the hierarchy with few choices but to fire Koeman and instate David Unsworth as his stand-in, albeit with no defined or articulated end point.

Unsworth struggles to keep an even keel

Given how impactful he and Joe Royle appeared to be when they took over the reins at Goodison following the sacking of Roberto Martinez for the final game of the 2015-16 season, there were high hopes that Unsworth could spark something in a demoralised squad.

At the very least, if he could bolster results sufficiently, it would have bought the club time to fully vet potential long-term candidates or wait until the end of the season when attracting a new manager would have been that much easier. In the best-case scenario for Rhino himself, of course, the door was open to former Toffees defender to earn the job for himself if he could really lead a complete transformation in the team's fortunes.

As it was, the problems ran too deep for a novice coach to resolve, particularly with the pressure to get results and move the club away from the drop zone hanging over him.

Between Koeman and director of football, Steve Walsh, Everton's recruitment over the summer had been scattergun, ill-considered and expensive. The lack of a striking signing left a huge onus on the shoulders of the ageing Rooney, the unpredictable and inconsistent Niasse, the young, inexperienced duo of Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Ramirez.

The midfield was overstocked with centrally-focused players with three of them — Klaassen, Sigurdsson and Rooney — all vying for the first-choice No.10 spot. It was Rooney who was most often entrusted with the role, which often left Sigurdsson playing out of position wide on the left while Klaassen eventually dropped to the bench and wasn't to make a Premier League start from late September onwards.

At the back, Keane was struggling to adapt to his new surroundings, Cuco Martina was forced into deployment as an emergency left-back when Leighton Baines suffered a calf injury in mid-November and of the new recruits only Pickford was looking remotely good value for his acquisition.

Things looked promising for Unsworth in the first match of the post-Koeman era, a League Cup tie at Chelsea. Everton lost the game 2-1 but, in the second half especially, they had shown spirit and increasing confidence against superior opposition that offered hope that he could stabilise the situation at the club. However, the next two games, a limp 2-0 defeat Leicester and a 3-0 drubbing at Lyon as hope of progressing in the Europa League slipped away, once again illustrated the scale of the problems he had inherited.

Nevertheless, a stirring 3-2, come-from-behind win over Watford and another determined display in a 2-2 draw at Crystal Palace, in which the Blues twice trailed, suggested once more that Unsworth had been able to regroup his charges and find a way forward.

There is no question that the 44-year-old was eager to be given the chance to oversee first-team affairs until May but his interim tenure was undone by two of the most alarming results of the season. Progress from the Europa League group phase was already out of the question when Atalanta came to Goodison on 23rd November but Everton were steamrollered by the Italians in a 5-1 rout. Three days later, they were ripped to shreds at Southampton amid more shambolic defending and sent back to Merseyside with a chastening 4-1 hiding.

The preceding four or five weeks of Everton's season had been played out against the backdrop of an increasingly public approach for Marco Silva, the young Portuguese who had come close to saving Hull City from the drop in 2016-17 and then made a strong start as Watford's latest manager, leading them into the top four immediately prior to the Blues' decision to oust Koeman.

Believing they had finally found a head coach they were prepared to keep, the Hertfordshire club knocked back successive bids — depending on reports, they were offered between £12m and £20m — from Everton to prise Silva away from Vicarage Road, leading Farhad Moshiri to eventually admit defeat in the chase.

With reported overtures to Shakhtar Donetsk with regard to their promising young manager, Paulo Fonseca, also rejected, Everton's de facto owner was forced to go, “cap in hand” back to the Premier League's renowned relegation specialist, Sam Allardyce with a compromise offer.

The one-time England boss, who had resurrected his image to a degree with a stint at Palace after being sacked in disgrace by the FA from the national team, had held talks with the Toffees in October but had insisted on a minimum contract of 18 months. Preferring terms just until the end of the 2017-18 season but concerned enough by the danger of relegation, Moshiri relented and, in a deeply unpopular move, Allardyce was appointed as Koeman's successor on 30th November; the foul-tasting medicine for a malaise partially self-inflicted.

It's impossible to know how the rest of the campaign might have unfolded had Unsworth remained in charge. With back-to-back home games against other floundering teams in the form of West Ham and Huddersfield Town, Rhino either had two eminently winnable matches in which to push the club back towards the right half of the table or he ran the risk of squandering six precious points if he oversaw two more defeats.

As it was, with Allardyce watching on from the Directors' Box — the Dudleyite would tate take credit for the victory — Unsworth's swan song was a thumping 4-0 defeat of David Moyes's Hammers on the back of Rooney's first hat-trick in Everton colours. That the win and clean sheet was secured with a makeshift defence made it all the more impressive but with Allardyce already agreed, it was too late for Moshiri to change his mind and stick with his caretaker head coach.

Allardyce does what Allardyce does

Everton's momentum from the win over West Ham carried into the clash with Huddersfield and after Ademola Lookman and the fringe players secured a magnificent 3-0 win over Limassol in Nicosia, two wins and a draw in the Anfield derby followed, leaving the Toffees in a healthy ninth place in the league.

Having dispelled fears of a protracted battle against the drop, Allardyce was presented with a rare chance to spread his managerial wings… or at least demonstrate that he had any. Sitting just six points behind Champions League-chasing Tottenham heading into the Christmas period and seven behind Burnley in sixth, the opportunity was there for the journeyman manager to finally prove his claims that he was a better, more dynamic coach than his limited reputation suggested and for Everton to re-mount a challenge for Europe.

That such hopes were ludicrously ill-founded would be starkly proved over the subsequent four games. Drab 0-0 draws against Chelsea and Championship-bound West Bromwich Albion were followed by a defeat at struggling Bournemouth and a dismal 2-0 home loss to Manchester United, a sequence in which Allardyce's team managed just four shots on target in total.

The lack of a regular goalscorer to share the load with Rooney was an ongoing handicap that would be addressed later in January with the acquisition of Cenk Tosun from Besiktas but the new boss was demonstrating a distinct lack of imagination or willingness to experiment with some of the young, creative elements of the squad who could have made an impact off the substitute's bench in close games.

The FA Cup Third Round tie at Anfield was a case that proved the point. Trailing to James Milner's 35th-minute penalty, Everton threw Lookman on as they chased the game and the 20-year-old quickly sparked the move that resulted in a Sigurdsson equaliser. The reds would ultimately prevail thanks to a late header by Virgil van Dijk but Evertonians had taken encouragement from both their exciting young winger's cameo and Allardyce's willingness to use him.

It didn't last. A brutal 4-0 hammering by Spurs at Wembley, where Everton again failed to register a single shot on target, followed by a frustrating home draw with West Brom put supporters back in the doldrums. Leicester were vanquished at Goodison thanks to a brace by new signing Theo Walcott and the energy of the returning Seamus Coleman but a 5-1 reverse at the Emirates to Arsenal made a mockery of Allardyce's reputation as a defensively minded manager able to nullify opposition threats through preparation and analysis.

Damningly, Lookman was let go on loan, albeit not to Derby County at Allardyce's suggestion but RB Leipzig in Germany. The surprised manager predicted the winger would struggle in a foreign league; instead, used as he should have been at Everton — sparingly but effectively — he delivered the goods.

Allardyce, meanwhile, would lean heavily on the Blues's strengths at home as he kept the club in the top half of the table over the run-in. Apart from a humiliating 3-1 reverse to champions-elect Manchester City at the end of March, his side would stay unbeaten on home soil between New Year's Day and the end of the season but the crushingly unadventurous football that would characterise his reign led to increasingly vocal opposition to his tenure from the stands.

Starting with the 2-1 loss at Burnley in March, Allardyce was barracked by travelling Everton fans at away games and by the time a desperate Southampton side had been denied victory in the penultimate fixture of the campaign, that clamour had spread to the terraces of Goodison Park as well. It meant that by the final-day defeat to West Ham, it was clear that his position as Blues manager was untenable; his relationship with the majority of the Everton faithful, uneasy from the outset, had become increasingly toxic.

Allardyce's dismissal was confirmed in the days after the season and was followed by a boardroom shake-up that included the departure of Robert Elstone as Chief Executive Officer and the appointment of Marcel Brands as the club's new Director of Football to replace the outgoing Steve Walsh. The former Bolton, Blackburn, Newcastle, West Ham, Sunderland and Crystal Palace boss had successfully extended his record of never having taken a Premier League club down and, in so doing, had finished in his highest league position, eighth, since leading the Trotters to sixth place in 2004.

All of which underscored two, perhaps, contradictory arguments: the fact that Allardyce had inherited — and then augmented, with Walsh's assistance we presume — an Everton squad with a good deal more talent than their early-season travails had suggested on the one hand (particularly once Seamus Coleman and Baines returned to steady the defence); and that the paucity of the Premier League outside the top six was so great that it was difficult to conceive of there being 12 teams worse than the Toffees in the top flight.

On the face of it and to observers outside of Everton, Allardyce had not only done what was asked of him, in securing a top-half finish he had perhaps over-achieved with a team that had looked to be in serious danger of going down before he agreed to come on board. But the underlying statistics supported the fans' frustrations and their dislike of the fare being served up week in, week out. In the final reckoning, only relegated Swansea City managed fewer shots than Everton over the course of the season and in Allardyce's time at Goodison, the Toffees were ranked last or next to last in almost all of the key attacking metrics.

Had Moshiri elected to keep Allardyce in place of the remaining 12 months of his contract, it would have been the final slap in face to a fanbase that had witnessed an almost unfathomable change from pre-season hope and expectation to fear and despair before the Festive season had even begun. That the club not only staved off any relegation fears but finished just one place below where they stood in May 2017 allowed the hierarchy to make a forward-looking decision aimed at getting the “project” back on track rather than one that promised stagnation and almost guaranteed restlessness and angst in 2018-19.

The identity of Everton's next manager isn't known for certain — Silva is the overwhelming favourite at the time of writing — but with the decks cleared and Brands installed as the new man in charge of recruitment and the playing structure, Evertonians can look forward again with a degree of cautious optimism. The hope is that the new management team can address the imbalances in the squad, both in terms of age and position, ship out some of the dead and less useful wood and bring in highly targeted, quality personnel to usher in attacking and effective football.

2017-18 may have offered few moments to savour beyond Rooney's stunning third goal against West Ham, Sigurdsson's terrific first goal for the club in Split. Coleman's adrenaline-fuelled full-90 comeback against Leicester, and the odd thrilling contest like those against Watford and Leicester but it will live long in the memory… hopefully as the nadir in a decade that has promised much but delivered very little in the way of tangible on-field progress for a genuine sleeping giant of domestic game.

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