Sean Dyche will be sweating on the availability of Abdoulaye Doucouré for Tuesday’s Carabao Cup Quarter-Final against Fulham after the Frenchman was forced off at the halfway stage of today’s win at Burnley.
Doucouré has been in a rich vein of form and a vital part of the team’s forward line, scoring in three of Everton’s last six games but he was replaced by Lewis Dobbin at the start of the second half at Turf Moor.
Dyche indicated afterwards that Doucouré has “a tight hamstring” but that he and the club’s medical staff were “hopeful that it’s nothing too serious”.
The same goes for Vitalii Mykolenko who failed a late fitness test on an unspecified soft-tissue complaint of his own and he, too, will be in a race to be fit to face the Cottagers at Goodison Park and then the trip to Tottenham Hotspur next weekend.
“Abdoulaye had a tight hamstring, so he’s another one we’re just going to have to wait and see,” the manager told evertontv. “Myko will be touch and go for Tuesday. I think Doucs will probably be touch and go [as well].”
Everton were forced to bring Michael Keane and Ben Godfrey in from the cold to replace Mykolenko and the suspended Jarrad Branthwaite in a three-man back line but both defenders acquitted themselves superbly, with Keane grabbing the second goal in the 2-0 win.