Confidence and quality in short supply but Everton take a point

Crystal Palace 0 - 0 Everton

The chafing irony of Bill Kenwright’s wholly ill-timed and misguided open letter to the #AllTogetherNow movement on the eve of a hugely important Premier League match was not lost watching Everton slog their way to an unsatisfying but not unwelcome point at Crystal Palace.

The Chairman’s missive was self-congratulatory in tone and yet his failings and that of the rest of the hierarchy have been laid bare in recent weeks, as a squad painfully short on depth and quality has picked up just three points from a possible 15 and scored just four goals in five games.

Setting aside the glaring lack of striking reinforcements, perhaps nowhere is that galling lack of quality more evident than in the full-back positions where Sean Dyche deployed yet another awkward and ill-suited centre-half and paid the price for a lack of foresight and action when Mason Holgate was sent off for a second bookable offence with 10 minutes left of the regulation 90 in this lacklustre encounter at Selhurst Park.

With Nathan Patterson deemed either too raw or lacking in sharpness to start, Ben Godfrey struggled at right back in Seamus Coleman’s absence against Fulham last weekend. Holgate was several shades worse this afternoon, putting in the kind of horrendous showing that should have seen him hooked long before he had the chance to clumsily foul Jordan Ayew for a third time on the day and receive his marching orders from referee John Brooks.

Both bookings were soft but Holgate and his Everton team-mates had been doing their best to make Ayew look like a vintage Brazilian rather than the unremarkable Ghanaian he has been throughout his career and the writing had been on the wall for a defender who has been on the Blues’ books for eight years without ever finding any real consistency. Dyche leaving him on as long as he did was a worrying dereliction of duty on the manager’s part.

Even allowing for Patterson's ill-fortune on the injury front, that a 34-year-old Coleman is comfortably the best full-back at the club is a damning indictment of Everton’s recruitment and whether he likes to admit it or not, "Chairman Bill" is partly culpable; that Rafael Benitez was allowed to trade Lucas Digne for the visibly declining Vitalii Mykolenko on the other side of defence just rubs salt into the wounds and has contributed to a plight that will look increasingly desperate unless this team can start scoring enough goals.

In that respect, the return of Dominic Calvert-Lewin was, perhaps, the only pleasing aspect from today apart from the fact that Everton managed to hold out for a point despite playing a quarter of an hour with 10 men. The striker, starting his first match since early February, has been eased back to fitness and lasted 90 minutes before being replaced in stoppage time and he came close to a hero’s comeback with an hour gone but, sadly, just missed the target with his only real chance of the game.

Indeed, with just one corner all afternoon, offering almost no threat from set-pieces and generally struggling to create from open play as Demarai Gray in particular came up short, Everton failed to provide their main goal-poacher with any real service; that will need to change on Thursday when Newcastle come to town for a fixture that has ratcheted up in importance from the Toffees’ standpoint.

With Amadou Onana still out injured and Abdoulaye Doucouré serving the final match of his three-game ban, Dyche continued with James Garner in central midfield and installed Gray wide on the right with Alex Iwobi in the middle behind Calvert-Lewin.

Everton had the first sights of goal when Dwight McNeil dribbled a shot towards Sam Johnstone in the fourth minute and Calvert-Lewin could only get a shoulder to a chipped Iwobi ball into the box early on but it was Palace who assumed the greater control of the contest.

Holgate’s first infringement on Ayew set the converted winger up for a header in the eighth minute but he put the chance over the the crossbar, while Michael Olise fired in a shot that Pickford dealt with comfortably and Tyrick Mitchell volleyed over after Ayew had been allowed by Michael Keane to get a cross in from the by-line.

Everton’s best moment of the first half came from Iwobi after they kept the ball despite a dreadful free-kick from McNeil, with Iwobi rattling a 20-yard volley off Mitchell’s short clearance that was heading for the bottom corner before Johnstone palmed it aside.

Calvert-Lewin’s daisy cutter six minutes before the break was comfortable for the keeper, as was McNeil’s similarly tame effort a couple of minutes later as the two teams went in level at the break.

The Eagles had the ball in the net after, not the for the first time on the day, they had caught the Everton defence flat-footed with a ball over the top but Ebereche Eze was correctly flagged offside.

Four minutes later, a booming Pickford ball forward was knocked down by Calvert-Lewin, Iwobi threaded a pass between the centre-halves back to the striker who rolled his man beautifully with a deft touch but hammered a left-foot shot inches the wrong side of the post.

Eze had Palace’s only meaningful effort on goal of the second period with a quarter of an hour to go but Pickford was equal to his curling effort that was searching out the bottom corner, the England keeper turning it behind and Cheick Doucouré lashed well over from a subsequent corner.

Everton’s hopes of sneaking a priceless winner more or less evaporated with Holgate’s second calamity when his lunge in on Ayew earned him his marching orders. Dyche threw Godfrey on instead of Patterson and eventually replaced Calvert-Lewin with Neal Maupay rather than Ellis Simms as the visitors dug in for the point.

Luka Milivojević came off the bench for Palace and saw a goalbound shot deflected behind off Vitalii Mykolenko and Eze fired a dangerous ball across the six-yard box but Pickford held on before Brooks called time on five minutes of stoppage time.

Depending on how this season pans out over the remaining six games, this was either a point that inched Everton to safety or an opportunity passed up to climb away from the bottom three. Much now rests on the home clashes with Newcastle and Bournemouth, the trips to Leicester and Wolves and hope for some kind of miracle against Manchester City and Brighton.

Seven of the 11 who dismantled Patrick Vieira’s Palace last October started at Selhurst Park today but with confidence at a low ebb, there was precious little of the quality shown in that handsome 3-0 win on show in yellow.

Somehow, Dyche needs to restore large measures of the former and coax more of that latter out of his charges against the Magpies where, hopefully, after full-throated and laudibly passionate support from the travelling Blues at Selhurst Park today, a raucous and defiant Goodison crowd will be there under the lights to propel them to what would be a vital victory. The alternative is too heavy to ponder.

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