If you are responsible for appointing a new manager, have narrowed it down to two options and those options are Marcelo Bielsa and Sean Dyche, it says a good deal about you, your selection process or your club’s state of mind. It’s like musing over what you would like for tea and tossing a coin: heads is chicken faal, tails is a bowl of oat and chia porridge.
Eventually, Everton have surely made the right decision. Or at least the safe decision. Or had that decision made for them. Or whatever. “Dyche is the safe pair of hands”, you will hear on repeat over the next week. Marcelo Bielsa is wedded to a philosophy, would have made them run and run and run, committed them to a high-energy training programme and inspired them as people and it may have gone south very quickly. Which is interesting, because Dyche shares plenty of those characteristics.
Everton’s worry, we were told, was that if they appointed Dyche there would be a decision to make about the club’s long-term strategy, which is cute because it appears to be the first time anyone at Everton has done that in about half a decade. If Everton’s biggest problem ends up being “should we stick with this man who has steered us away from that massive iceberg we paid £300m for and put in the sea upon the ship’s course”, sighs of relief should be audible from St Helens.
Dyche has enjoyed his sabbatical: dancing in Rock City, eating curry in the establishments of Nottingham’s Maid Marian Way, generally looking eight years younger than when he left Turf Moor. He’s done the podcast rounds too, cleverly remembering to diversify his responses to fit expectations.
On Training Ground Guru, Dyche spoke at length about evolving the playing style of his teams in the future. With the Coaches’ Voice, he spoke in detail about the tactical nuances of 4-4-2. On Keys and Gray, he mocked Bielsa and Jesse Marsch and laughed at any technical term longer than two syllables.
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“The minimum requirement is maximum effort,” is one of Dyche’s favourite phrases. When once asked if Burnley’s new signings were told of the manager’s infamous demands for hard work, Dyche laughed ominously, paused and said: “We don’t tell them, the players tell them.”
That is likely to be Dyche’s quick win at Goodison. There is an accusation (not least from many of the club’s supporters) that Everton’s current players are emotionally uninvested in the plight, that they don’t care about losing every week. It’s rarely accurate – players almost never down tools. It’s simply that broken confidence and being poorly coached in a dispiriting environment looks a little like surrender. The players are the tangible representation of the broken club, not its cause.
There are elements of Everton’s first team that may delight Dyche too. If there was one secret to Burney’s success, it was a strategy not to limit the number of shots that their opponents took but to funnel them into areas from where the shots would be taken, allowing them to be blocked. In 2018-19, Burnley blocked 222 shots; no other team managed more than 170. Fun fact: no team has blocked more shots than Everton this season.
As you look over the squad, crucial actors stand out. Conor Coady and James Tarkowski are a gloriously Dychian combination in central defence but the manager knows Michael Keane well if he wishes to break it up. A workmanlike central midfield pairing is ready to be built between Amadou Onana, Idrissa Gueye, Abdoulaye Doucoure, Tom Davies and Alex Iwobi.
The squad contains wingers, inverted or otherwise, including another former Claret in £20m summer signing Dwight McNeil. Neal Maupay is the perfect replica of Ashley Barnes and Dominic Calvert-Lewin the potential upgrade on Chris Wood. Dyche took a worse collection of players to seventh in the division; now he must make a team out of these.
At which point, because this all sounds jolly and jolly easy, we should remember that there are fewer guarantees than we are being tricked into believing. For all that Dyche is a synonym for safety and the glorious comfort of midtable, that reputation was established in specific circumstances. This is the third job of his career, and his first new one in over a decade. Then it was Burnley in the Championship, where he won three of his first 10 games and eight of his first 27 to move them from 14th to 13th. He must start quicker here.
This is a big job for Dyche. The assumption is that he stayed at Burnley too long, that the takeover broke his spirit and the sustainability of his masterplan, but those are only assumptions because there is no other evidence. Elsewhere in the Premier League, Unai Emery, Roberto De Zerbi and Julen Lopetegui have all enjoyed fast starts and Dyche would consider himself markedly different to all three.
Dyche may not only be a firefighter, but there’s sure as hell a fire that needs putting out. Taking Everton down would leave his reputation scorch-marked and sooty.
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