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I don’t know whether Saturday’s draw with Brentford was Sean Dyche’s last audition to prove that he can take Everton forward post-takeover, but he is quickly running out of chances and excuses.
Ask any Everton supporter outside Goodison on Saturday teatime and they would give you the same answer: this was a necessary marriage for a long while but there is little appetite for staying together now.
They had just watched the perfect Dyche storm, a manager who knows that Everton are fighting and who has thus turned them into scrappers but struggles to change gears when the situation requires it.
Everton had an hour against 10 men and an opponent who had failed to take a single point away from home all season. Not only were they restricted to a series of low-quality chances, but they allowed Brentford to create the most dangerous chances on the counter.
This was Dyche being asked: what more have you got? He always said that he played a certain way at Burnley because of what he had and that better players would lead to different football. Everton are playing exactly like Burnley and Dyche’s response was to say “Most managers can change it by chequebook. We can’t do that, so the development continues.”
I’m sorry, but that’s not on now. You’ve been in charge here for almost two years. Yes, the budgets have been particularly tight over that time – and that’s not on you. But Everton do have decent players and there was plenty enough in that front four to create chances and win home games.
It’s not only that Everton have six points from six games at Goodison this season (Brighton, Crystal Palace, Bournemouth, Fulham, Newcastle, Brentford) and have scored five goals during them. It’s that you watch them and can’t really see what the plan is to create high-value chances.
That might just do for Dyche, at which point plenty of pundits will say that he has been badly mistreated and deserves to spend on this squad to shape it in his own vision. That is a highly generous assessment.
This team is limping during its final season in a grand old ground because the team has been hardwired to assume that you can’t expect more than this. And I just don’t believe that that is true.
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