Everton are just good enough to ruin a better team’s season

Here at SBN Soccer we believe in listening to you, the readers. And so, after a weekend of Premier League football in which Chelsea consolidated their lead at the top of the table, Tottenham turned in perhaps their best performance under Mauricio Pochettino, Liverpool and Manchester United underwhelmed their way to a draw, and Manchester City made themselves look very silly indeed, we’re here to answer the big question …

Hard to say. It’s been a slightly peculiar half-season at Goodison Park, and it’s come in three parts. They started the league in excellent shape, winning four of their opening five and climbing to second in the table. Then they fell apart. A loss to Norwich in the League Cup preceded a run of five losses and four draws in 10 league games, a sequence which left them ninth in the table. Ross Barkley wasn’t playing, the defence wasn’t working, and Ronald Koeman looked a little lost …

… but, just when everybody was happy to conclude that they were in fact rubbish, they rallied. Sort of. A win over Arsenal kick-started a run of four league wins from six, though this included a last-minute loss against their nearest and dearest Liverpool. Then they embarrassed themselves in the FA Cup against Leicester City, throwing away a lead in miserable fashion. Finally, to bring us up to date, they rebounded from that with a moderately remarkable, extremely amusing 4-0 hammering of Manchester City. None of which makes much sense, but there we are.

A lot of the fallout from the weekend has focused on the mess Pep Guardiola is making and comically failing to clear up, but much of the credit should go to Koeman and his team, who ran right through that mess and kicked it everywhere. There are two certainties about City’s defence that opponents can exploit: It will be made up of skittish central defenders and slowish full-backs, because that’s the squad Guardiola’s got; and it will be well advanced up the pitch, because that’s the football he plays.

Earlier in the season, Leicester frustrated then dissected City by sitting deep and clipping balls over the back line for Jamie Vardy and Riyad Mahrez. Everton achieved the same by picking three central defenders, stifling City in possession, and then sliding passes into the spaces between the defenders for Romelu Lukaku and Kevin Mirallas. And once City’s defence have been unhinged, a goal is almost certain to follow, for Lukaku is very good and Claudio Bravo only exists in passing.

The win over City put Everton four points clear in seventh place, but that still leaves them seven points behind Manchester United in sixth. This is because the top six of the Premier League are having one of those greedy seasons, where they shovel points into their mouths like the hungriest of hungry hippos.

(Comparisons like this are always a little silly, since each season is a different thing, but United’s 40 points after 21 games would have put them fourth at the same stage last season, and third the season before. We can assume this is a point of some irritation for José Mourinho.)

However, while seven points is a significant gap, it’s worth looking at the results. With home wins over Arsenal and City, and draws against United (home), Spurs (home), and City (away), Everton have taken nine points off the super-accelerated top six. No other team in the league has managed more than five. Admittedly, they’ve yet to go to White Hart Lane, Anfield, and the Emirates, but the wins over City and Arsenal demonstrated skill, nous, application, and the confidence to take on the notionally superior teams. At least, the ones that can’t defend properly.

But if we look at their results against teams outside the top six, we see that they’ve been beaten by Burnley (10th), Bournemouth (11th), Southampton (13th), and Watford (14th), and drawn with Crystal Palace (17th), Hull City (18th), and Swansea City (20th). Also, as noted above, they’ve been bounced out of the cup competitions by Norwich (11th in the Championship) and Leicester (14th).

What Everton are, we can probably conclude, is inconsistent, incomplete, and a work in progress. Which makes perfect sense and is no cause for alarm. But given the vibe around Goodison Park on Sunday, and the way the players executed their manager’s plan, we can likely add: promising. Koeman kept faith with his back three, and backed youngsters Mason Holgate and Tom Davies to compete with Sergio Agüero, and Yaya Touré. Courageous stuff, in the Yes Minister sense.

Yet his players responded to his faith, and to his fury at the cup result, and it worked. And given the result and the manner of the result, we can further add: dangerous. Everton aren’t going to win the league this season, and are vanishingly unlikely to gatecrash the top six’s pointfest and nick one of the European places. Their squad still has a few notably thin spots, and their manager’s only been in the job six months. Beyond that, they don’t have the money of those above them.

But they have Lukaku, who is brilliant. They have Barkley and Mirallas, who can do brilliant things. They may have found a functional shape for their defence, and if Morgan Schneiderlin can find his pre-United form, they will have improved their midfield. And they have kids coming through the ranks to claim first-team places, which is just about the best thing a football club can do with its time.

The scrap for the top four places is shaping up to be exceptionally tight, and with the exception of City, Everton have to play everybody else up there one more time. They won’t end up champions, but if they can contrive a couple more big performances at the right time, they could end up ruining somebody else’s season. They may have already ruined City’s. It won’t do forever, but when true glory is out of reach, some exciting performances and a little schadenfreude make perfectly acceptable substitutes.