Clueless

Everton are looking for their sixth new manager in six years since Farhad Moshiri became majority shareholder. 

There are plenty of good things to say about Moshiri. The new Everton ground at Bramley Moore dock, construction proceeding apace, would not be happening wothout him. The issue over the need to replace an ageing Goodison Park - the first purpose-built association football stadium in the world according to Wikipedia* - thwarted attempts to sell the club or secure investment for more than two decades with even Newcastle and Aston Villa, let alone Manchester City and Liverpool more attractive acquisition targets than Everton. Moshiri has underwritten significant spending in the transfer market - over half a billion pounds. 

The problem though is that under Moshiri, even with Bill Kenwright at his elbow, Everton have been clueless with no apparent strategy for development of the team. One wonders how so much money can be spent and yet the squad can be so light in numbers and thin on quality.

The scattergun approach with managers might work for Roman Abramovich but there is plenty of continuity behind the scenes at Chelsea and there has been a perennially strong squad for a long time now. After a while the players don't respond to the manager so Abramovich changes him.

Part of the problem at Everton is that the players, most of whom are on long contracts, know the manager is temporary. They don't respond; maybe even flout instructions and performances are weak.

Each time the club is looking for a new manager many fans say they need to appoint a top quality manager with a proven track record. Well, Ancelotti won the Champions League twice as a player and three times as a manager, one of only three managers to achieve the latter feat. Everton started brightly under Ancelotti but in the second half of his sole season in charge they were poor. Benitez had won the Champions League and Europa League as a manager. Again Everton started well under him but it only lasted a few weeks. So appointing a high quality experienced manager isn't enough.

Benitez's appoint was always a risk in so far as some fans were never going to accept him and it was to be expected that a poor run of form would soon lead to a toxic atmosphere. But the events of the last six weeks reveal so much of what is wrong at Everton. As results deteriorated in early December the board backed Benitez in a power struggle with the director of football, Marcel Brands. Brands was sacked, presumably to give Benitez time to get some improved results under his belt. At a vibrant Goodison a couple of days later Everton recorded their first league win since the end of September against Arsenal. There have been no more wins in the 5 games since, just a creditable draw away to Chelsea with many regular players missing and several stand ins - which is telling.

Sacking Brands made no sense if Benitez's job was aso under threat. While Everton's transfer business has been very dodgy much of it was legacy players on long contracts and it has arguably improved under Brands with buys such as Richarlison, Digne, Mina, Allan, Doucoure and Godfrey who have all arguably been successes. Andre Gomes looked great before his bad injury, Gbamin suffered an even quicker bad injury, Branthwaite looks a good youngster and Olsen and Begovic have been good goalie understudies.  Moise Kean didn't work out and Rodriguez was a luxury player for Everton but his record of goals and assists has been missed. The only totally dodgy siging of Brands's reign, for me, is the hideously overpriced Iwobi who many believe to have been imposed by Moshiri. The Liverpool Echo rated all the signings under Brands, probably a bit more favourably than I have**.

To back Benitez, sack Brands then sack Benitez within 6 weeks looks inept and leaves the club with no driving force and less than two weeks of the transfer window to go.

The saga over Lucas Digne, a player brought up at Lille, PSG and Barcelona and who has 43 caps for France, is telling. Benitez clearly lost it with Digne, excluding him from the squad before selling him. Newspaper talk is that Digne was upset because he was taken off set piece duties in favour of Andros Townsend. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Firstly, Townsend hasn't been on the pitch all the time. Secondly, it is useful to have a right and a left footer standing over free kicks to put doubt in the defending team's minds. (You have to engender a genuine element of doubt, mind, which Everton rarely do). It is just as likely that the fall out was over Digne's productivity: he recorded 8 assists two seasons ago, 7 last season and this time in half a season - zero. His productivity might have been linked to how Benitez wanted Digne to play, possibly more conservatively with wingers in the team to do that job.

But to back the manager offloading your left back, who happened to be one of your best players, on 13 January having signed a new left back on 1 January, only to then sack the manager on 16 January? Crazy. One can only hope the new left back, Ukrainian Vitaliy Mykolenko, settles down after two underwhelming performances since arriving. He even managed to make Digne look like a competent defender (which he isn't). Hopefully he won't, like Digne, acquire a dressing room reputation for not believing he had always played well and nothing was ever his fault.

All that said, Benitez's record had become indefensible. His micro-management approach may well be past its sell by date and wasn't working. The defence continued to leak despite that supposedly being a Benitez strong point. Zonal defences with zones left vacant, as per Brighton's goal from a corner flicked on to the far post. Everton went behind early in games with predictable regularity. Indeed the only stat on which Everton are at the right end of the table is points won after being behind. They had a lot of practice at it.

The bookies favourite for Moshiri's seventh "permanent" manager is his first, Roberto Martinez, who he inherited and sacked after only a few months, Everton having finished a disappointing 12th. Things have rarely been much better since....

I have mixed feelings about Martinez because it all started very well. The team played a modern, possession style of football and the crowd got used to talking among themselves in the quiet passages of play. But with Barkley and Lukaku up front they had explosive pace and finished 5th, nearly matching David Moyes's best premier league finish (4th) while recording their highest points total in 27 years. We sang this along to the Beach Boys Sloop John B:

We play from the back / with Ross in attack / the School of Science / is on its way back!

And it was possible to believe it. But Martinez was too dogmatic in his approach to possession football. He appeared to like to consolidate possession when his team won the ball back, rather than trusting his team to attack at the transition. I realise that transitions are dangerous as well as opportunities, but it was just too ponderous and predictable. Since then he has taken Belgium to first in the world rankings - for two and a half years - and third place in the 2018 World Cup. Maybe he has learned stuff, maybe not. But what worries me even more is that while he took Wigan to an FA Cup win on his watch, beating Manchester City in the final (and Everton 3-0 en route), he also got them relegated. Now Wigan were not an established Premier League team*** but even so, is he the man for what could turn into a relegation struggle? 

Interestingly when I checked Martinez's Wikipedia entry just now it and it says:

"Martínez is the manager of Everton football club, who he expects to be relegated in 2021/2022 season"

Must have been hacked by a Liverpool fan!

Other candidates? Forget Frank Lampard, I wouldn't want him anyway but he needs to be very careful about his next job - Everton would be career suicide. Many fans want David Moyes back - they didn't after he'd been at Manchester United but he's doing well at West Ham, challenging for the top four. So why should he go back to the basket case that is Everton?

Graham Potter? Not as much of a punt as Mike Walker but while he has done well at Brighton, Everton would present him with the under-performing big club challenge, which does for many.

Wayne Rooney??? He's done well at the even bigger basket case that is Derby, but a big punt.

The simple fact is that, apart from a brief flurry under Joe Royle and a period of stability and relative success under Moyes, which lacked only a trophy, Everton have under-performed for 30 years. Which, unfortunately, corresponds precisely with the money-laden Premier League era. In that time they've had many competent managers: Howard Kendall (mark two and three), Walter Smith, Martinez, Ancelotti, Benitez. None have thrived apart from Moyes - a risky pick from the Championship when appointed - and Martinez, for a while, but he inherited Moyes's team and a club infused with Moyes's ethos. At the time journalists used to say that the only training gorund that felt remotely like Manchester United's was Everton's with a family feel and a dressing room that genuinely welcomed new players. (I have it first hand from a Premier League drug tester that none of them have a family feel now).

My biggest nightmare is that Everton fall into the Championship with an expensive stadium project to fund and saddled with onerous Fair Play constraints if they were not to bounce straight back. Yes, there are more than enough poor teams in the Premier League right now who Everton should easily finish ahead of. But none of them are playing with so little confidence.

Everton seem to be beset by individual errors, which tends to happen when the players' brains are scrambled.

My hope is that Everton can regroup enough to pull away from trouble, get a manager, any manager, who can stay for three seasons of stability, get the stadium built and open and then Moshiri will have an attractive proposition that he can sell to someone with at least as much financial clout who eiher knows what they are doing or can appoint good people and let them get on with it.

Be careful what you wish for...

Nil Satis, Nisi Optimum, huh?

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadium#:~:text=Goodison%20Park%20was%20the%20first,3%2C000%20spectators%20was%20also%20requested. Though it comes from a book published by Macmillan called School of Science by James Corbett so I don't know how verified that is. But Goodison Park was purpose built in 1892 and most football grounds of the day would have been multi-purpose or converted from other use and would not have qualified as a "stadium" for which I assume you need more than a stand and some dressing rooms on one side of the pitch. I'm sure Ibrox runs Goodison close though 

** https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/sport/football/transfer-news/marcel-brands-everton-signings-rated-20860931

*** Arsenal and Everton are the two most established top flight teams, Arsenal ever present since 1919 and Everton since 1954