Everton end 2023 with dark day in the Black Country

Oh well, back to the drawing board. I still think we'll be safe but Dyche has to give up the ghost with Keane and his uber-defensive, negative tactics.

Tired players, injuries and confidence-battering. In trying to compensate, he had Everton playing too deep in the subsequent games. Today, with 5 in defence, really took the biscuit. Keane was poor. Calvert-Lewin never looked like scoring. But Dyche had surrendered the midfield to Wolves. Everton have been beaten by goals in all the League matches, showing little chance of recovery.

Now Dyche is heading into the New Year under pressure, with a defeated squad. He can only blame himself.

On today's showing (?) whether skint or not, we need some new blood (loans or swaps etc) or alternatives to choose from. I won't hold my breath, of course. Why does Dyche leave substitutes till it's too late, and then usually the wrong changes, when it is obvious to everyone Plan B isn't working???

Gung-ho, Sean Dyche and Everton.

Spot the odd one out.

Happy New Year, Jerome.

He put his best Premier League team out to play in the Cup.

Happy New Year, Brendan, to you and the family.

He also does not help himself when he won't give youth a chance. Most Premier League clubs have at least one shining star they are introducing but where is ours?

We really don't have a shining star from the youth system. Metcalfe possibly but he's a defensive midfielder. We sold our best prospects, Lawrence and Samuels-Smith, to City and Chelsea respectively. We can't conjure up talent unfortunately.

I for one am very grateful for the work he's done since arriving close to a year ago, when we looked dead and buried.

This isn't an old side.

Even Lewis Dobbin has been getting minutes, more so of late.

What "young" phenom do you believe that has been undeservedly left out?

We've just played three tremendously difficult games. Today was the only one you could realistically claim was a dud.

Sean Dyche has accrued 47 points in the 38 league games he's managed. Considering that Frank Lampard had pissed away a lot of the "easy" home games before his sacking last season, that's a more than respectable number.

Today was a bad day all round. Tactics were poor (I said beforehand we should go 4-4-1-1, with Harrison in the split striker and Danjuma on the right), and the player performances were absolutely risible.

But it was an off day, after a year which has seen us take great strides. I understand your disappointment today. But things will improve.

Are you suggesting Dyche should have not played our first 11 against Fulham?

What should we do against Palace in the FA Cup?

I'd rather that we secure Premier League football, given that there's no guarantee that we're going to be "given" back any of the points that they stole from us.

Dyche should have rested Calvert-Lewin for the Spurs game and some key players for the Premier League campaign over Xmas. He knew he had a busy Premier League schedule over Xmas.

Everton are out of the Carabao Cup and back in the relegation dogfight. The decisions regarding the FA Cup fixture are now more difficult. I think the FA Cup would be more important than the Carabao Cup.It is even more important to survive in the Premier League.

I wouldn't disagree with that.

We will never know, of course, but if you don't try when it looks like defeat is staring at us once again. Could also be a revelation, Lewis has scored (v Chelsea) and been overlooked since then!

Don't be silly.

Not saying they would have but of course they could have done worse.

I think Dobbin played the entire second half the next match after he scored (replacing injured Gueye if memory serves?).

But I agree, today was a good opportunity to give him and Chermiti a look once it became obvious we weren't up to much.

Look at the past winners since the inception of the Premier League only Everton, Wigan, Portsmouth and Leicester have won it outside of the usual suspects, I can't see it being any different this season.

If we had our actual points total in the bag, it might be worth going all out for the cup, but we don't have that luxury and there's no guarantee that the appeal will successfully see any of the points returned.

The League Cup was worth going for because we were in a Quarter-final but a long run in the cup might prove counter-productive with such a small and limited squad; it's sad but that's the way of the modern world.

3-0 down on 63 minutes in, he's woken from his slumber but it's way too late. He's done this throughout his time with us. Reluctant to use his subs in a paper-thin squad will cost us dear.

Wolves deserved this victory, they got the game plan right and were much better. Dyche was a reluctant bystander. This is a huge learning point for him but I fear his stubbornness stifles his development in this particular blind spot.

Of course Everton's bench was full of individuals particularly the young guns who could come on and change the game with a moment of brilliance.

There was... erm, let me think…

No easy games in the Premier League this season and I don't think we will have any recruits in January, so all hands to the pumps – it's going to be a rough ride. So be optimistic, just like me.

Minutes played from 2 to 30 December 2023 by the starting XI:

Pickford: 8 games - 720 minutes
Patterson: 7 games - 495 minutes
Branthwaite: 7 games - 630 minutes
Tarkowski: 8 games - 720 minutes
Keane: 4 games - 268 minutes
Mykolenko: 6 games - 540 minutes
Harrison: 8 games - 664 minutes
Garner: 7 games - 630 minutes
Onana: 6 games - 484 games (Is he carrying an injury?)
McNeil: 8 games - 704 minutes
Calvert-Lewin: 7 games - 484 minutes (Is he carrying an injury?)

Dyche needs a break. The players also.

I appreciate the busy schedule etc, but these are professional footballers, their chosen career. If they want the trappings, they should be prepared to go that bit extra. It's not that it happens every month but, even if it did, it's part and parcel of the job.

I dare say other teams have had players with 'minutes' that could match ours and have managed considerably better. I'm not a statto, but would be surprised if I was wrong.

We had players on the bench who could have alleviated the pressure on the forwards and probably had more chance of scoring, through trying or wanting to create an impression on our good but stubborn manager.

I myself called for changes during the match. But then I don't know what options he has. But you are correct. He is stubborn.

We have generally had close results this season, win, lose or draw. The only poor ones were Villa and now apparently Wolves. Must be a West Midlands thing.

A trio of uninspiring muppets steering the ship… we are doomed!

I would give Dobbin, Gomes, Godfrey, Beto, Coleman and Chermiti starts and rest others like McNeil, Onana, Patterson, Harrison and maybe Tarkowski and Branthwaite.

Dyche needs to get his strongest eleven together and show them how they were second to almost every ball against Wolves and reorganise them, and form some more appropriate tactics and team selection for the Villa game to get back on track.

The team have done really well in the first half of the season given our predicament; let's consolidate that and push on in 2024.

Happy New Year to all.

But for me, Wolves won this game because their players have pace, can pass accurately, and attack with a shape. None of our players has pace and our poor passing has been commented on before. What on earth can Dyche do to fix that?

Keane again takes all your blame but surely it's time we recognised that Harrison, Calvert-Lewin, Garner and McNeil contribute very little to our attacking abilities, and manage to lose the ball with embarrassing regularity. Only Onana of our front men (including the midfield) looks like he knows what he is doing.

Maybe it is true that Dyche has got the best out of the crew he has?

After criticising Pickford for his Man City performance, it is only fair to point out he stopped the score reaching 5 or 6. A few amazing saves.

A bad end to what has been a year of undoubted improvement.

So I wasn't surprised when Wolves added a 2nd and a 3rd, Wolves didn't have to be clever they just kept putting the ball behind our back line were their willing forwards and midfield players to run onto. All 3 of their goals came from crosses that we failed to deal with, and on each occasion their player got goal side of our defenders and reacted quicker.

I do feel a little sorry for DCL its a thankless task being up top on your own with nobody within 4 or 5 yards, our central midfield whether through being tired or whatever hardly ventured into Wolves half. But this is the 8th game that DCL has failed to score in and he has had chances, I think yesterday might have been worth putting Beto up alongside DCL, but Dyche hasnt played 2 out and out strikers from the start of any game. And usually when he subs DCL he brings on Beto in a like for like.

I put yesterdays performance down to some players looking really fatigued after so many hard games in a short space of time, and because our style demands high energy that we just didnt have today. Villa at home next in the league and Palace away on Thursday, I would suggest wholesale changes will be made for the Palace game.

Dyche was being praised to the skies after the Spurs game yet now he is a dinosaur, he is stubborn, and his assistants are crap!

Everyone is entitled to a bad day and we had it yesterday. He will no doubt rotate as far as he can for Palace and the players will have a good rest til Villa – which will be my second game of the season after a stressful house move!

Calvert-Lewin maybe needs a break though Beto strikes me as a better version of Niasse – is Chermiti up to a start?

I would not be concerned about the FA Cup – we have bigger priorities this season and yesterday showed that we cannot spread ourselves too thin!

I still believe Dyche will get it together again for a run to move us up the table. But Villa and Palace will be horrible, clearly we need a break to regroup.

Hope we can stay in the FA Cup, but I'd prefer the points vs Villa.

Yesterday was a shocker from the manager, the failing back 5 system, the failure to act. On top of that, the players looked fatigued.

I think now changes for the FA Cup are a necessity, but that doesn't mean throwing in the towel. Beto, Danjuma, Chermiti, Dobbin, Godfrey, Gomes, Keane, Coleman. Also the introduction of one of the lads, Mackenzie Hunt, Jenson Metcalfe who I really like. Get some freshness out there and have a good go.

Many of the players from yesterday need to recover, then come back strong and resume normal service in our successful 4-4-1-1 formation, hopefully with Doucouré back too, fit and strong. I still think that Thelwell will be trying to add one or two loans if he can do some shrewd trading.

Good managers adjust to how the opposition play. When we did go to 4 at the back, we did look much more threatening but the game was already gone and, as we pushed for a goal, we left ourselves exposed.

Dyche is very much a Plan A type of manager and does not adapt to changing tactics well within a match. Some games you can see players running on empty who need to be subbed off but these changes don't come early enough.

It's a shame as I do like so many things about Dyche but he needs to manage games better during a match. I think his stubbornness to alter things is really frustrating.

The glaring weaknesses are there for all to see, so what can Dyche do about it? Not a lot, it seems, but some players should not be starters after these recent results.

After a half-decent Spurs outing, we never expected this debacle and, whilst nobody really expected anything from the Man City game, we all thought they would get something from Wolves who slap us once again.

Certain players need to be sent packing for good before more damage is done. The FA Cup tie is the perfect opportunity to start a few of those lads who are chomping at the bit to get in.

Surely those benchwarmers cannot do much worse than what we saw yesterday but we need something more from Dyche also – whose position is now under scrutiny after promising so much only a month ago.

Martinez said he needed seven new players, he got about two or three.

Koeman was the biggest unmitigated disaster of the Moshiri years, followed by Walsh, and definitely the inexperienced Marcel Brands.

Silva could have been decent, but Brands signed the wrong players. Allardyce got us back to being the respectable Everton of those plucky years when we used to sit around 7th place.

Before he left, he allegedly gave Moshiri a list, with a few nepotistic names, but not before giving us Walcott and Tosun.

Ancelloti was a great name but soon began to play very uninspired football (did his team begin to dip once Doucouré got injured?) and couldn't wait to get out of Goodison Park.

Benitez was a crazy choice, but he might have been here longer if he hadn't lost most of his better players to injury (something a small squad just can't afford to do) and then came Lampard, who was very amiable, but was far too inexperienced for what was slowly becoming an impossible job.

Dyche came into a club that was literally on its knees, and even the most loyal but logical Evertonians were already fearing the drop. He did fantastic to keep us up and his reward for this was a transfer budget of absolute zero, except for Thelwell sorting out Beto, with a 'buy now, pay later' signing, and now this very small squad of players have just been mullered because Wolves was just a game too far, during this busy period.

We should be well clear of relegation and such talk would have already been banished from these pages if we hadn't been given a 10-point deduction. So stay calm and have faith because it's obvious that this team is so much better than we have been in the previous 24 months.

Let's get positive and talk about winning the cup, because nothing brings a football fan more joy than seeing their team win a trophy. Honest.

The problem is that Dyche has to get a result. Losing is absolutely no use – no matter how well the team played.

Against Spurs there was a chance to get a result or even a win, especially with an unmarked Gomes.

Dyche can't be blamed for the way Danjuma absolutely pissed away chances against Spurs.

Tony (#40), that's an impressive summary of the travails of the club post-Moyes. I think the point is well made as regards the need to keep things in perspective.

Having seen Dyche's post-match (Wolves) interview, I feel he was very honest, he knows the players are running on fumes right now, they will only have a few days recovery before the cup game, let's see how we do?

Though, yes, he has his limitations to my mind. (Being subjective… and haven't we all!)

I don't agree that it was all down to him that we stayed up last season, but the training methods, increased fitness, and the new voice certainly helped.

The players exonerated themselves during the rump of last season, and were played where round pegs fitted round holes in the main. Though there were a couple of games where Dyche got his tactics wrong (Man Utd, Fulham and Palace).

This season, as has been pointed out, without the points deduction, we'd be fine.

We have a small squad, and a select group of players favoured by Dyche (a little bit of an Achilles heel is that tho!). I was undecided on his appointment, but he has salted away enough credit in the bank to get a pass through this period.

Remember, just four games ago, he was 'Super Sean', a potential manager of the month, maybe even the season... Go read the threads!

Unfortunately, now with the players looking tired and very lethargic against a Fulham team there for the taking.

A lackadaisical start against Spurs meant we were two down before we started playing, and if the ref had the courage of his convictions, we'd have had a draw, and maybe better if Danjuma had a little more accuracy and composure (or luck!) Or anyone else for that matter.

Then, against Man City, we were already tired, and probably mentally beaten before we started.

I got slated on the Live Forum for calling the starting setup; even though we were being carved open in the first 15 minutes, and again, we didn't adjust in the second half. More of the same, and we were just put into a low block and had to wait for the inevitable! With a little more diligence, we could have maybe taken a point.

Wolves was just the culmination of selecting the same fatigued players in the wrong formation and not being football savvy enough to see it wasn't working, or being too proud to admit he'd made a mistake, and not freshening things up, especially with the FA Cup tie coming up.

A few fresh legs and heads, maybe with 'inferior' ability, might have helped, but unless you try, you don't know? With the obvious result of playing the same team as always being that they'll have even less juice in the tank.

Those last four games, to me at least, was where stubbornness won out over pragmatism or tactical creativity. A demonstration of Dyche's limitations. Plus why does he nearly always sub like-for-like!?

Like I said on the other thread though, 4W and 4L this December would have been accepted I think beforehand considering our circumstances and squad (size and ability). I just wish we'd got something from the Spurs game and we had beaten Fulham. Bygones...

I wonder if Dyche has 'performance meetings' where he and his backroom staff along with Thelwell and his team can have honest, constructive dialogue and maybe learn lessons, despite Dyche (now a cliché) saying, "I've been in football a long time"! It might help us in the long-term.

As I've been tutored recently, you learn that "Every day is a school day!" Or at least has the potential to be one...

My worries are, unless he just makes a few minor changes, or reflects more, we may just struggle with the next few games... Or rather the 'back 19'.

Villa (H) ?
Fulham (A) ? Our new bogey team!
Spurs (H) ?
Man City (A) ?
Palace (H) A chance of points
Brighton (A) ?
West Ham (H) ?
Man Utd (A) ?
Liverpool (H) ?
Bournemouth (A) ?
Barcodes (A) ?
Burnley (H) A chance of points

All those games I've marked with a question mark, at least to me, seem like a tough ask to get much. I'm not saying we can't, and with longer periods between games and players recovering better, we might get better results than I expect.

Then that leaves us with the six final games...

Chelsea (A) ? Depends who is their manager then.
Forest (H)
Brentford (H)
Luton (A)
Sheffield Utd (H)
Arsenal (A) ?

Not a bad run-in, but that is very much dependent on how we navigate those games beforehand...

I just hope Dyche becomes a lot more pragmatic and a little more welcoming to a few new ideas and squad players.

He's going to earn his salt in this back 19, if we don't get any of the missing 10 points back.

Happy New Year to one and all.

ps: A little New Year's Eve quiz for those calling out Dyche; "Just who do you think could, would, or should replace him?"

Have faith, and believe... Not blind faith though.

I'm actually more confident about the second half of the season. We'll have players back, we'll be playing one game a week, and most of the "better" teams we're due to face love possession. Our strengths have been defensive organisation, breaking at pace, and being obdurate.

Beyond the FA Cup game, we'll have Doucoure back, the players will have played a single game in two weeks, and the squad should be refreshed. There are six or seven weak teams above and below us. We'll be fine.

"Have faith, and believe... NB Not blind faith though."

Or Adam Faith either!

See you Budgie! 👍😂😜💙

I wish I could share your optimism, I really do. I'm not on a downer, but when I look at those fixtures above, I think we'll be in a right old scrap, if we don't get the missing points back...

Other than that, all the bonuses you said about us are equally applicable to our opposition. Plus, if Dyche sticks with his formulated game-plan for the next 19 games, we won't be surprising anybody in 2024! They'll know how to play us, and thus set up accordingly.

Being obdurate and set up to play on the break is great but, as we have seen, Rob, when we go a goal down, all too often it doesn't turn out well for us.

Though the Forest, Chelsea and Barcodes games showed we have stickability as long as we don't concede. The Burnley game was we got the job done first half, and played 'catenaccio' for the second half.

Though, please objectively remember, we were lucky not to concede and possibly drop points in that game. It was the start of the legs going for some players such as McNeil and Harrison.

Derek, me 'owd mucker [47]

Who the hell is Adam Faith!? Hehe. 🤣

You're showing your age there, mon ami! I never used to watch Budgie, too much of a soft, southern ponce for me! Though I thought Adam and Roger Daltrey in McVicar were brilliant together, and it gave me one of my favourite film quotes of all time;

"Alright alright, I know I'm gunna lose here, but I'll be the best fuckking second you've ever seen!" – when the screws (Prison Officers) were trying to move him to another prison.

Watch from 1:00 to 2:30

It is edited for bad language though, and it's the whole movie, if you like nostalgia. 😀👍

I loved the movie at the time!

So it's definitely a "Don't plead no special case for me!" Let's fuck the corrupt Premier League and let's go and win the FA Cup.

A great movie – with an all too familiar ending, because not many people are prepared to stick to their morals and stay true to themselves unfortunately!

Talking of quotes from Budgie as it happens (Iain Cuthbertson who played Charlie Endell)

" There are two types of people in this World Budgie ! = The Have's and The Have Nots !
Unfortunately, you fall into the latter category !
Priceless.

He made subs and changed the system, we looked better for it. Fact remains, the squad is paper thin, flogging it until it breaks helps no-one.