Everton take on West Ham Utd on Monday night at the Hill Dickinson Stadium as the focus returns to the Premier League campaign.
This was expected to be a celebration for David Moyes of the great start he has given Everton in this season’s Premier League after masterfully steering them away from the relegation zone since he replaced Sean Deyche in Janaury.
But things have turned a little sour after it fell apart in what some thought should be a straight-forward game against Wolves in the Carabao Cup. The consensus view seems to be that he got it seriously wrong in making so many changes, that he should have played his strong side from the start, and then rotated in his fringe players after securing a victory — or at least making a decent fist of it.
But it’s gone now. A long, long wait for success in the League Cup in all its weird guises continues for at least another season, leaving the FA Cup in the New Year the only possibility for winning a trophy this season.
And so the focus returns to the Premier League, where a couple of good results on the back of inspiring performances from Jack Grealish and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall were thought to have set the tone for dramatic improvement in Everton’s prospects this season as they finally had players who could be seen to bring both skill and attacking flair to Moyes’s workmanlike crew.
But the range of tricks and taunts that comprise the playbook Jack Grealish has at his disposal seems both limited and vulnerable to him being crowded out. Combine this with his reluctance to go for goal himself instead of trying to set up the perfect feed for someone else to score, and you have the root of Everton’s problem as those strikers are sadly nowhere to be seen.
Neither Beto nor Barry have produced anything like what is required up front so far this season, but it would be too radical surely to anticipate that David Moyes would adopt a different approach and possibly pair Iliman Ndaye with Grealish playing further forward so that he might feed the critical final ball to the Senegalese striker in advanced positions that should increase his chances of scoring,
Perhaps the test will come against his former charges at West Ham, who have won 1 and lost 4 of their 5 Premier League games so far his season and they now languish in the relegation zone, one place above Wolves.