And we still won can you believe that!

I don’t believe it - or didn’t, when I saw it. But hey, maybe he was just trying to be fair..
Ok, awful joke, I admit it

Come on Michael, this IS Everton we’re talking about!

Anyone watch on website? Was your reception shite as well? What does streaming depend on cos I?ve watched it in same cafe twice with different results!!!!

Anyone listen to ITV4 commentary? i might be biased but I thought we were quite dominant and just lacked a bit of concentration that gifted them chances. ITV would have had ya think we got twatted by them.

matty, it was shit but then I tried via myp2p.eu with Sopcast and it worked great

I could not believe Arteta missed that. But, we did dominate them, hit the post twice, and really should have scored a couple others. It seemed to be a bit of a lack of concentration on our part. But we won quite comfortably, have won our group, and our unbeaten run continues. One more thing, having won the group this should allow us to rest the likes of Arteta, Cahill, and others for the final game away to AZ. This should be a valuable opportunity to give some guys a rest and not risk injury. Would Van Der Meyde fancy playing a game back in Holland??? I’m kidding.

Bloody work. Only saw the second half. But the boys looked good. We dominated. Piennar did great again even though there were no clips from his forward play for the biography - he was good all over the pitch. So good when we are attacking and takes up good positions defensively and picks up the slightly loose balls. Peanut! Peanut! Met Moyes once and got the impression he was a bit of a poker player - reckon he is getting Peanut in the bag (he he) while keeping quiet about things.

Oh today is good to be a blue. Anyon remember the last 10 years?

Think I?ll put down the Strongbow now.

Matty, online streaming is usually pixellated compared with real TV. The worst thing is if it keeps buffering during transmission, which EvertonTV rarely seems to do these days.

As for the ITV commentators, I thought they got it about right,. Once again our on-the-ball play was shown up as being of limited quality, while the plaudits will all go to the amount of "WORK" we had to do to win this match.

Yes. I?m sure it was a great night at Goodison, a great game to watch, and a great last-ditch win... But do you honestly think performances like that will get us into the final? We struggle against even remotely competent opposition. We MUST step up the quality.

geez guys. yer i agree with you here, great performance by everton. Barely scrapped a win against a depleted zenit side. The ump was bloody great helped you guys out so much. not only did he give away a penalty and red card, but forgot punishing the reckless player who injured domiguez and did not give that penalty when the ball clearly hit a defenders arm after an arshavin shot.
Yes so fine and great performance by everton.

Aaaaagghhhhhh.....why are people on here so OVER critical!?!?

We won a tough game against a very good side who defended resolutely for an hour - great victory, great performance and we’ve won the group. What more do you want?!!

dear michael kenrick
i wouldnt call zenit incompetent. If anything everton is incompetent, barely able to to win a 9.5 men zenit (yes the loss of dominguez counts) against a thirteen men everton (home crowd plus the icelandic ref) so if i was you i would not be so cocky and arrogant

I might be a lightweight on 3 cans of Strongbow (thwack, thwack, thwack) but my fuddled brain thinks ?John? might not be a blue. What dya think Mr Kenrick? I site ?you guys?.

And aren?t we all supposed to have full names these days?

Hello John. We won :- )

I thought Mcfadden played much better than Johnson.

Was very disappointed with Johnson, all he did was ran all over the field while playing little football.

He couldn’t hold the ball, he could shoot, he basically didn’t play.

Di!d I watch the same game as you, Micheal!! We dominated and controlled the game except for three chances that they blew and MK can still say they were obviously superior! For heavens sake Michael, give credit where it?s due, you are supposed to be a supporter running ToffeeWeb, that sort of report I would expect from the Red Shite not one of our own. Not been on the ToffeeWeb long and really enjoying except for the doom and gloom merchants like MK.

We played the ball on the ground throughout. Big improvement. Only problem I think was that we over complicated it particularly Arteta. But we are improving all the time and there are some times when winning ugly is good enough.

Hello Dave

You sound like the kind of guy who might like to share my last can with me while we link arms and dance round the room. Its a good day - enjoy.

Leave MK alone though. He is undoubtedly one of us, a true blue. I don?t think he is working on this site for HND coursework. Focus on the joy and the John - be off with his head!

Lads, we did great tonight. Zenit are the Chelsea of Russia and have great quality which came at a huge expense. Moyes should try to steal away Arshavin though! We created more in the first half and on another night may have bagged three or for. Profligate finishing and woodwork (twice) cost us, but Timmy did the biz in the end so worry not. Tommy Grav would improve our ball retention greatly though!

You don’t become Russian Champs without having a bloody good team. I agree with Dave Kelly, Everton were the better team, though our numerical advantage helped of course. We struggled to break them down, but we deserved the win. However, I do feel for the Zenit fans, travelling so far only to see the ref cock up their game plan.

I am a bit worried about AJ what is going on with him, I defended him in the past and I still regard him but his game has changed its only run, run, run now he is never looking for the goal and never getting in dangerous positions.

Thought Johnson was ineffective yet again. Jagielka not good enough. Lescott pure class. A good win overall.

Lescott is a good defender, but his distribution is abysmal. I that Jags had a decent game; you could say he was out of position for the clear cut chance in the second half, but Arshavin is a class act and his passing is fabulous; in fact, they’re a bloody good side Zenit.

AJ’s still getting fit, he’ll score goals.

We won, kept another clean sheet, dominated the game, and still those who run this site say we can not do anything this year. We had numerous scoring opportunities, DID NOT PLAY HOOFBALL, went with a 4-4-2 with different strikers, and won the bloody game with ease. Bayern Munich drew with Bolton Michael, so does that single game mean that Bayern Munich have no chance to win this competition???

I actually thought Jags was solid at the back, as was Lescott (little surprise there). Jags looked about 6 inches taller than usual, quick and composed. I know it’s only one game, but made me feel a little reassured about losing Yobo for a spell in January.

All in all, a solid performance. We dominated possession and they rearely stringed together more than a couple of consecutive passes. Should’ve ended up 4-0.

Agreed that Arteta and Neville overcomplicated things at times. Cahill and Carsley were great in the center of the park. Pienaar looked good except for the final ball. Baines worked hard all night. Strikers were too quiet for the most part, and Faddy’s 2-on-1 was abysmal. You have to finish chances like that!

The red card was b.s. - almost glad we didn’t score the PK...almost.

Sorry for the David?s of this world (Barks... Kelly... Moyes!) but I call it as I see it. Always have, always will.

If we played well, if we played good football, if we played anywhere near our potential, then I would be the first to say so. We didn?t. And I can assure you it does not take a genius to figure that out, whichever game you were watching.

I may be hard to please but that was called grinding out a win. We still need to improve if we are going to win anything this year. (Note: that is not quite the same as saying "we are not going to win anything this season..." but by the look of it some of you have serious trouble reading the written word.)

Thats a pretty blinkered view you got ther MIcheal; teams live & die by their results, nothing more.

We just won the group by the way. : ))

I was there tonight and thought Zenit played good football. They never let Everton settle on the ball. Tghey were well structured and passed the ball very well. They are obviously a good side but I still think we would have won against 11. There was some good performances on the pitch tonight and although they threatened a couplke of times with some slick moves I thought Everton controlld the game well. Jags did ok I thought considering its his first start for a while. He needs games to get up to speed. Lescott great game. I also thought that Phil Neville had a decent game. I just thougth they rushed things at times tonight and maybe they could have gone through the middle more. BUt agin like I said that was a decent team who know how to play football.
You did well tonight you Blue Boys

I disagree with the match report when it says Zenit were clearly superior. I think we were clearly superior but a lot of our players didn’t look up for it tonight, like others have said more concentration was needed. i really think we could have taken them to the cleaners if we’d have applied ourselves more

Fantastic result, today.

After Advocaat screwed over the Australian national side, I thought, 'wouldn't it be perfect to beat his cashed up mob 1-0 with a 90th minute Cahill goal'. You know, just to let him know what he is missing out on.

Just 300 seconds from perfection.

Some strange posts I'm seeing in here..

I went to the game myself and actually thought that we were rather poor. Despite the fact that we were playing against 10 men for most of the game, we then decided to shoot ourselves in the foot in true Everton style and consequently made life very difficult for ourselves.

We were disjointed at the back and lacked concentration going forward, certainly in an edgy second half. I can appreciate that Mikky?s missed penalty may have shaken a little confidence out of the team but considering the amount of possesion we attained our football was well below par - and to those who are claiming that we didn?t resort to "hoofball" I'm sorry, but you must have been watching the wrong game.

Having said that though, we got the scrappy goal that the scrappy performance called for and won the group, so I'm happy about that, but we certainly must improve on performances like this going into the knock-out stages. My MOTM was Lescott, although I thought Pienaar and Carsley had good games. Phil "Chip" Neville, as always, was useless.

Nick,

I’m sorry but we did not play hoofball today. The occasional pass through the air does not constitute resorting to hoofball. The ball can leave the grass occasionally. Disjointed at the back???? They only had 2 or 3 scoring opportunities the entire match. We had 15 corners to their 1, had 61% of possession, and double their shots.

David,

It was more the lack of composure and decisiveness in the final third that irked me the most about the game. You can have loads of possesion against a side limited to 10-men, but out of all those shots if none of them hit the back of the net then it’s usually classed as a waste of time. I can’t knock the players for trying, but jesus christ was our shooting this evening so frustrating to witness.

Maybe "disjointed" is the wrong word for how the defenders performed, but we certainly looked edgy when they were hitting us on the counter attack, and on more than one occassion they got beyond the back four and we were fortunate not to conceed one or two goals. Thought Jags had a bad game this evening, and Baines wasn’t fully up to scratch either, though the latter was clearly just having "one of those games".

Also, "passing through the air" is totally subjective. If a long ball up through the air meets one of our players then I can accept that as a good piece of football, but I define "hoofball" as playing the ball through the air from the back only for the opposing defenders to deal with the ball quite comfortably, which is how, in my honest opinion, it went for most of the match.

Okay Nick,

If "playing the ball through the air from the back only for the opposing defenders to deal with the ball quite comfortably" is how you say it went most of the game, how did we have so much of the possession and have 15 corners. We played the ball on the ground today, just admit it for God’s sake. I agree that our finishing today was poor and we possibly lacked concentration, but we held possession today which you admit can’t be done with hoofball.

I wasn’t actually suggesting that we resorted to it for the entire game though. By "for most of the game" I actually should have said "for most of the time we played long balls during the game". I agree that we played the ball along the floor as much as we could, but there were periods (especially in the last 20 or so minutes) were long balls were being pumped up the field in order to get the goal we were looking for.

Lets face it though, we do it every game so it’s hardly suprising at this stage is it..

First: mission completed, we did it! Great, Hail Moyes and the lads. We played mostly well, only the end result was poor. Main culprit was Mcfadden. I like him being unpredictable but he messed up all the time in he first half. Must be embarrasing for him to watch the video. I think he must go to Brum, he’s back to his worst.
Besides a couple of scares from Arshavin (buy him!) through passes (they are very good at in that), we stood firm.
Lescott was great . Pienaar played well he’s worth three Osmans. No Yakubu this evening, he might have released the tension earlier because he has propably the best footballing brain of the lot.
I think we’ll get Brann in the next round.

Not quite sure how Michael and others have inferred that Everton did not dominate tonight’s game from start to finish and also not sure how it was suggested that Zenit played good football. I didn’t see them play any football, let alone good football. Obviously the numerical disadvantage hindered Zenit but Everton’s dominance was consistent throughout and this is despite us being far from our best tonight. We lacked a lot of quality in the final third and look much better playing the 4-5-1 system. McFadden was quite awful tonight and both Arteta and Pienaar were quite disappointing, but surely our dominance despite several low-key performances is a positive sign.

Great win and we are going through into the final...at least I hope.
Watched it on EvertonTV. Great stuff and after all the image is good and didn’t have any problems during transmission. Does anyone knows if the Fulham game will be available on EvertonTV?
See you mates.
Portuguese Proud Evertonian.

And there was me thinking that, despite the performance, we won the match albeit scraped it, finished top of the group and extended our unbeaten streak to 9 matches.

I thought that supporting a team through thick and thin was what supporters did. So when your team wins, granted we all want 7-1 scorelines but have progressed as a team to our biggest high in Europe for 22 years.

So c’mon, lets get behind the team for the next game and push the Blues onto another win and keep this good run going. Afterall, a winning mentality is better than a losing one.

Phil Neville played well tonight, he made 1 error but as usual fans get on his back, in my opinion only Carsley and Lescott were Better.
We have won topped the group i am happy

I completely disagree that Zenit were the superior team. I know we had an extra man but we had 58% possesion to 42%. 13 shots to their 3 and 14 corners to their one. I thought we stuck to our plan and kept getting at them, and never resorted to long balls even with only 5 mins left.
I thought it was a good honest game but felt we deserved the win.

I have to admit I was quite surprised reading the post match comments on here.
I didn?t think we played nearly as bad as people have made out here. Often teams struggle to play against 10 men, as the sending off seems to galvanise the remaining players. Although we weren?t brilliant today, we still had a number of chances. I really think it has showed though that we have a midfield that is best suited to 5, rather than the 4 we played with today. I just think with the additional man in the middle of the park (Ossie), we seem to be able to carve out better opportunities in the game and defend a lot better (Portsmouth game was an exception).
I was on Moyes? back after our few poor performances earlier on in the season, however I truly believe he is trying to make us play attractive football and I still saw some of that tonight.
So guys, I guess just a bit of a reality check would be nice. We won....and we?re top of the group!!! Let?s now try and move up the table in the PL and we?re sailing.

COYB!!!

I thought McFadden played better than Andy Johnson last night. I thought Andy Johnson didn?t play any football. All he did was ran and ran an ran.

He couldn?t pass the ball, he couldn?t take on a man, he didn?t shoot, he basically was useless.

at least Mcfadden did some dribbling and at time took on 2 -3 defenders sucsessfully.

DM should?ve sub Johnson instead

I actually believe we missed Leon Osman’s industry last night. If we had played 4-5-1 as we have been doing lately then we could well have run riot after they went down to 10 men. Maybe it’s not the dull defensive tactic that we all thought it was.

And Johnson just isn’t good enough. I think it’s time to unload either him or McFadden in January and then one in May and bring in somebody with pace and an eye for goal.

Got to say that McFadden has hopefully played his last game for us. Come and get him Brum, you are welcome to him. Aimless would be the best word to describe him. Wearing a Scotland shirt he can launch pinpoint ballistic missiles at goal. Why not in the blue of Everton?

AJ, similar. Lots of huff and puff and will run until the cows come home, but with no end result. Too lightweight and because of his (undeserved) reputation for diving, will never get half the decisions he should. A lot of opposition defenders realise this too and will be happy to muscle him more than they would some others.

We can take positives and negatives out of the game. Not our best performance, but against Russian champions with a fair bit of technical skill, we hustled well for most of the match. For once a dodgy ref decision went our way and given the ones against us over the last few weeks/years, I’m apologising to no one!

Arteta’s continuing poor dead-ball plays (corners, free-kicks and now pens..) is a concern, because his open play is still good (although I agree that he might be trying too hard to impress his Spanish compatriots with some of his play). Howard was solid when called upon, as was Neville. Baines had a mixed game, but still has the potential, whilst Lescott looked awesome. Jag was the only one who looked very ordinary and I fear he’ll end up a utility player only used when we get significant injuries in the months to come (I had hoped for more when he signed).

I think the 2-upfront set-up worked against us yet again. I’ve always been a 4-4-2 fan, but I have to admit that 4-5-1 with Cahill seems more successful. Our midfield didn’t dominated and Timl was less involved (although still as industrious as ever..and a good poacher’s goal too). Pienny’s work rate was fine, Carsley looked as solid as ever and ’Our ’Tater’ looked threatening at times when he got the ball. I also think we missed the industry of Osman (as part of a 5-man midfield).

My biggest concern was up-front. We had another AJ headless chicken performance (and a surprising lack of ball control at times), while Faddy....well, he continues to frustrate me, as he has the skills and ability but he never quite seems to put it together consistently enough for us. Didn’t like his reaction to be taken off...perhaps I haven’t forgiven him for his ’leaving’ talk of a season ago...and with that type of atitude I think we may be seeing the last of him in the next few games.

Playing against 10-men opposition is not easy (remember the 85 FA Cup Final?) and it meant that Zenit defenced deep a lot of the time, although give them praise for some decisive counter-attacks.

Top of the group with one game to go...that’s great. Even the Prem’s Top 4 have games when they win without having their best formation or being at their best (The RS an obviously example). I think Moyes would have learnt a lot from that match about where are strengths are at present and where progress is needed.

It’ll be interesting to see what team Moyes puts out against AZ. I think it’s a chance to give the youngsters up-front a full game and rest the likes of Tim and Mikky just to see what we’re like without them.

Well done lads....Here’s to 2008!

Dave,

I seriously thought that Faddy played better last night then AJ.

Instead of trying to pass to AJ,. he should’ve just whacked the ball to hell.

He’s been known to score from worst positions.

I guess being dropped many times took it’s toll on his confidence

But I seriously think that AJ should’ve been substituted instead of Faddy, things may even change for the better much earlier

Hobbs again; no one take him on.

The top and bottom if it is that we were poor the other night and were lucky to win.

Our performances have been poor of late and if anyone thinks that winning is all that counts then you are an idiot.

I drive 450 miles to be entertained. The other night wasn?t entertaining.

That is the problem with footie at the moment; coz there is so much cash involved with not losing, teams don?t attack. Basically it is shite and I am getting more and more sick of it by the day.