14 days in the bottom 3…

To think that because of a previous connection with Liverpool, some on here would not have a European Cup-winning manager whose family was already happily based locally. Lord, give me strength!

Do I like the fact that I am right? No, I bloody do not.

Very Simply, Silva must be sacked for his own good because now 100s of thousands of fans have woken up Monday morning to this stark reality!!

Getting rid of him today is the perfect and historically the correct time to dismiss him (as we have time to at least speak to a possible successor) and his woeful coaching methods and team.

I can only pray that we bring in an experienced proven Manager at this level because your observations prove beyond any reasonable doubt that this is a face-saving season and the probability of relegation is extremely high if the Board do not act immediately. They must act today!!!

What a sorry sad state for this wonderful football club to be in!!

Now don't get me wrong I think he is head and shoulders above Silva but I would question his integrity if he took the job and I wouldn't want us to approach him and be rejected. That really would make us a laughing stock.

There are plenty of good managers that I'm sure would be interested.

We just have to make the right choice based on substance not gut feel or hearsay.

Your pointing in the wrong direction mate. I wasnt one who particularly wanted Silva, but I would never blame those who advocated him. They merely gave an opinion. They were not part of the selection process.
One of the most knowledgeable posters on this site put forward a very strong case for Silva. He still harbors hopes he will turn it round. He will be as disappointed as anybody at our current plight.

I cant believe you can be so critical of others then suggest a washed up ex RS manager who nobody else seems to want.. My memory isn't that clear regarding events at Newcastle, but didn't they pay him a kings randsome to get them out of a similar position to the one we are in and still go down ?.

Managers are like boxers. When the sun sets on their glory days They very rarely (if ever) come back.

Jay Harris is on the money. This may not mean much to those living outside the City, but the Kopites are pissing themselves laughing at the very idea. They are desperate for us to offer him the job and for him to turn his nose up at it.
They no longer need need to find material to make Blue lives miserable. . Our club hands it to them on a fucking plate.

I really am struggling to come to terms with this notion. That its gathering strength worries the fuck out of me. The fans of this club have been at civil war for thirty years and we've got people suggesting we bring in a manager who is already detested by the overwhelming majority.

We will all have our own personal choices when/if Silva leaves, but please. knock this fucking nonsense on the head

With regards to Benitez, I cannot offer a credible opinion on whether he is the best of the candidates to replace Silva – I lack the expertise. But if the bosses do decide that he is the best choice, I hope and expect that they wouldn't steer away from him merely because of an insult expressed in 2007. I also believe they are smart enough to do enough legwork with any managerial candidate to determine in advance whether they are at risk of being turned down. I can't speak for Merseyside, but I think the whole world will laugh if we offer the job to A prominent candidate and get ourselves rejected.

For starters get rid of:
Coleman
Schneiderlin
Sigurdsson

These are too slow to play Premier League football. Something Everton will not be doing with these 3 and Silva the clown in charge. Get rid of all 4!

There is no dignity with this club, the fact they were desperate to employ Allardyce tells me they will resort to any measures. I would not be surprised if they do approach Benitez, only for him to turn us down as he doesn't want to manage 'a small club'

As they say down under I may have jumped the shark. Probably caused by my own choice of Benitez being overlooked and dismay about Silva getting the nod.
I admit that for non playing reasons my preference for Rafa could have been wrong yet for football reasons I strongly preferred him over Silva.

As for options, good managers are employed: Howe, Dyche, etc.. and they are not going to leave their clubs for us. It will definitely be a rookie, and it will have to be (I hope) a good one. I wouldn't mind giving Unsworth a go, mainly because he would have a much better squad than last time, and hopefully a transfer window, that we can't possibly miss, by buying players for a soon to be ex-manager.

I believe that Marco will survive the January transfer window though, the fact he didn't get his centre-back or striker would buy him that much time, I fear.

The man is so arrogant that he is neither worried about our plight, making sound-bites to the effect of he can still rescue the sinking ship when the upper deck is level with the waterline.

He wins no matter what, as he will have yet another compensation package to add to his collection. Get him out the sooner the better and take Boa Morte with him as he appears to be as much use as an ashtray on a motor-bike.

Dick - it doesn't matter who your choice, or anyone else's is. Unless you own a sizeable stake in the club you/we have no say. Only those who have a voice at the match can show their displeasure. More recently expressed by grafitti on the walls of Goodison, and a stay-behind protest during Martinez reign.

Jay and Darren are spot on. We already had the embarassment of the courtship with Allardyce after Koeman was binned, and they couldn't get their first choice (Silva). After Allardyce ruled himself out we had the total ignominy of having to cave to his demands of an 18 month deal, only to get rid as planned after 6 months to bring in Moshiri's chosen one - Silva. And there in lies the rub. Moshiri has put his reputation with fans on the line with this appointment.

How long before we emulate the neighbours and become disgruntled with our ownership? Holding placards at games beging for "DIC* to Save Us". Hopefully never.

* Dubai Investment Corporation

It is of course possible he will stay - he turned it around after a 19 day break last year. We now have the international break. But he has got to get a spark from somewhere and change something, otherwise he'll be gone before Christmas.

Most of us can see that Schneiderlin has stunk the house out for over 3 years. Silva is picking him every week! Same for Sigurdsson this season - he is not doing it, so get him out, and drop this number 10 formation also - it's not working!

I feel the only hope he has got is to play DCL and Kean together up front. Let Kean come deep to get the ball if he doesn't want to play with 2 main strikers. But it is as clear as day that there's not enough goals in this team. He might as well die on his sword having a go, than dying a slow painful death like we are currently...

We messed up with Koeman, sacked him during a bad run of fixtures (for those who point out that Atlanta and Southampton weren't difficult, this was a team that hadn't won away for around a year), and when there was finally a run of winnable fixtures we panicked and appointed Allardyce. Unsworth barely had 2 consecutive days training but still managed to win the expected fixtures.

If we stick with Silva I'm confident we'll give it a good go in December, but probably end up with the same results as the City game. However that run of fixtures is not the optimum time for a new manager.

It looks like I was wrong and happy to hold my hand up and say so. I think their have been some mitigating factors (not least Brands failure to find a new CB and a reliable goalscorer) but there are several glaring issues this season that have not been fixed and it begins to look as though his assistant Joao Sousa was an essential component of any success Silva might have attained.

He'll get 2-4 more games to get some wins and get us up the table. Brands will want to give him as much time as he possibly can. But there aren't many signs of a turnaround. A fit Gomes would help and we've actually been solid defensively from open play, set piece has been the achilles heel once more and will likely be the hill upon which Silva perishes. The attacking system has been dreadful, far too little creativity and no clear plan other than getting it wide for the full back to cross in.

I posted this list of alternatives on another thread if of any interest:

In terms of replacements there's a few decent options though never such a thing as certainty with managers. Broadly speaking there are the:

‘experienced winners': Mourinho, Wenger, Benitez, Allegri, Mancini.

‘Solid organisers': Dyche, Wilder, Moyes, Hughton.

‘Next big things': Nagelsmann, Gallardo, ten Haag, Spirito Santo, Arteta, Potter.

‘Wild cards': Marcelino, Neville, Unsworth, Howe, Pochettino, Adi Hutter.

Some of those (Nagelsmann, Poch, Mourinho) are probably unrealistic. Chris Wilder is bookies pick at the moment and I think he'd be good. I really like Graham Potter but can't imagine he'd leave Brighton so soon. Benitez would seem a very sensible choice if you can look beyond the history. Very probably Unsworth would be in as caretaker to give Brands time to make the right choice.

Let's see where we are come the end of the season, I'm still certain Silva will turn this round.

If he's going to get the sack, then it's today or not until the next break. I don't think that this will happen. Moshiri will think that he's in no better place than he was under Martinez, Koeman, Unsworth or Allardyce. He will also be concerned that whatever manager he gets will have a good season then this will happen again., He will also be very aware that he was told he was too premature in appointing Allardyce, that we were never going down, and so he will be more willing to let this play out. Kenwright will also remember how Moyes had a good year, then a bad year, then a good year then a bad year before then nailing us down as perennial top 6 finishers.

Moshiri will also be concerned with the compensation payout, and the inevitable transfer kitty he will have to give to the next manager. This will be far more than the money we lose in league placings for finishing 17th as opposed to 7th.

Sam, I'm surprised at your choice of Wilder. I find his style of football not very pleasing on the eye and his tactics quite basic. I also hear that he relies heavily on his backroom, I forget who's the main coach there, it might be Alan Knill. Chris Wilder's a Sheff Utd fan, and I doubt he'd be too keen to leave them just now, not for our car crash of a club.

For me I'd love Pochettino. Highly, highly unlikely but if he's getting sacked at same time as Silva certainly worth a shot.

More realistically I think Gallardo looks a really interesting coach but probably too risky for us. I think Hutter has done great work and is similar to Silva in many respects so fits Brands MO. And I think Allegri would be an intriguing option though again probably unlikely.

Who'd you like if Silva goes?

How about the new kid on the block at Famalicão?

Ha! Could you imagine if we sacked Silva and hired Sousa?! Maybe Marco could work as his assistant?

Wonder if Brands will stick to his guns or be tempted by a more experienced head?

Judging by how well Sousa has done, I believe he must be the defensively minded one of the two. Maybe we can throw a load of money his way and re-hire him as assistant manager and get rid of Luis Boa Morte?

Famalicão aren't the romantic story you think they are though. Basically Jorge Mendes is heavily involved there and they have signed all the players he wanted them to (80% of their transfers) and so they should really be top 5 for sure. They play Benfica after the international break and it'll be a big test for Sousa.

Sadly, I don't follow the Portuguese football as closely as I did when I used to visit my Dad out there all the time. I will have to watch the highlights of that one though.

As for Brands, I get the impression that he likes to be the boss, that any new guy will be firmly a head-coach type and I would also bet they are younger than him (he's 57). European managers are used to being head coaches and as long as they have full control of the first team, they are used to not being in full control of transfers. I would expect him to go for someone like ten Hag. But ten Hag is only 2 seasons into the Ajax job, and only last season (without Brands at PSV) was able to get them their first title since de Boer won it in 2015. de Boer's failure at Inter, Palace and (I think) even in MLS is a cautionary tale though.

However, there are no-nonsense managers available who can organise a team and be ruthless enough. Blanc, Rudi Garcia, Marcelino. Wenger with Arteta could relaunch us long-term but probably not plausible. All expensive but less so than losing credibility as a club week after week.
Or maybe Brands comes up with something else, being such a highly-rated professional.

Worst case scenario is that we keep hoping for some sort of resurrection by Silva. That's outright madness considering what we have seen and where we are.

Dick - your post is not helpful. I never had a view one way or the other on Silva being the right man for the job -but plenty were supportive of him and made that judgement in good faith and with the good of the club that we ALL love at heart.

The fact that it isn't going to plan at present - to say the least - doesn't in any way reflect on those who held that view with genuine belief. Nobody on here ' foisted' anyone anywhere - it was the club's decision.

To then suggest fellow blues' future opinions should not be expressed on here in case - in the fullness of time and with the benefit of hindsight - someone can point the finger and tell them they were wrong and somehow implicate them in the decision to appoint Silva is frankly unhelpful.

Having and expressing opinions on here is a key reason why the site exists - and that's all they are - opinions. They are certainly not nailed on insights or 100% predictions. no matter what your opinion was about Silva's appointment.

I don't post that often - yours is one of the reasons.

I wish our board was ruthless and decisive in wanting success, maybe we wouldn't like it, but it would surely be better than meandering which we are doing now.

The stats don't make good reading and we have a manager who won't change, so the stats are only going to get worse. Until the board become ruthless, we will just drift along until the inevitable happens.

We have a shed-load of over-paid very average players with the majority we can't get shut of and a manager who has no creditable CV to warrant being allowed to spend and waste on more of the same.

Don't get hung up about being a big club – how can breaking into the top six be 'big club' thinking? Winning the thing is 'big club' thinking. We are so far behind the RS it's unreal and it's not that long ago that we thought they could go into administration.

Unsworth and Royle could have settled the ship and perhaps Dyche could do the same but best mangers are already working and the John Moores days of getting the best are well and truly gone.

Towards the back end of last season, I really thought we had turned things around. We played, for most part, with a swagger and intensity that promised much for the new season. Now, we have gone back to square one. The football, with the exception of the Wolves game which I thought was really entertaining, is laboured, slow, ponderous and completely lacking in any kind of intensity.

We have lost 2 players albeit good players, so for me, there is absolutely no excuse for the shoddy football we are displaying this season. As others have frequently said, it's just like watching Martinez's teams. Lots of pointless possession with little or no end product.

Silva wasn't my choice but he was winning me around at the back end of the season. Now, well I have no idea where we go from here. We rightly had good expectations of a decent season and' unless we start producing pretty quick' then it's yet another season ruined.

We need grit and passion, we need play speeding up tenfold, we need a manager that will encourage the team to take a chance on the break and not keep possession just for the sake of it, we need players to actually get into goalscoring positions as our record in that department is quite shocking.

We need some kind of coherent plan for the defence. Bear in mind this is still 75% of the back 4 we had last season that performed so well towards the end. What's happened to try nice little triangles that Digne and Bernard played to create space? What happened to the good partnership that Coleman and Richarlison were developing? It's like everything good that came out of last season has been shelved to be replaced by mind-numbing tactics.

How long do we give Silva? Well I guess that's the big question. I do know one thing though, we can't afford another slump like we had last season. Silva has to figure it out quickly or it really will be curtains. It comes to something when the fantastic away support turns against him. Silva should be in no doubt what that means.

Someone like Laurent Blanc is my preference.

Because, in my eyes, the first bunch doesn't look like having a winning mentality. Most of them won in the past, costing fortunes in players, and never really developing players (Wenger is possibly the only exception), while managers who got their clubs up, with no big names, in a very equal competition (The Championship) are labelled losers?

Managers who raised their profile crafting the division and crafting to win games against similar opposition are losers? I think many of you are just being like Silva with his selection, picking by reputation and not by value, credit, or performance.

What we should be looking: the people (manager's mentality); the process (style of playing, organisation of the squad and playing arrangements); and product (results – did the manager get the results his clubs required him to get?).

The exact opposite has happened. Gbamin got injured and Kean cannot seem to impress Silva as yet. Gomes has been absent and Delph is injured again(????)

Silva has gone back to Calvert-Lewin, who still looks like he has a ways to go as a good leader of the offence.

It has to be Silva who has not yet formulated a decent strategy for getting after some of these teams who we could label ''weaker" than the Blues. If they don't score first, they seem to lose it in certain areas and then mistakes at the back are costing us all the points of late. Apart from Man City (who we can be excused from not beating) they should not have capitulated in many of the remaining games.

The immediate weeks after the break are crucial to keeping this team out of the bottom zone and I feel that Silva really doesn't have what it needs to turn it around. Everton have had many ''down'' periods since the great Kendall era but this last month or so is worse than any I have known given the players they have.

Reason I ask: Walsh was good at unearthing gems on a shoestring… all of a sudden, he bought overpriced players when he had money. It's like all of his scouting expertise went out of the window.

Moyes was brilliant on a shoestring; when he had money, he wasted it.

Is Brands going the same way? Surely he had some players scouted at PSV that weren't in the 㿊-million category. Where are all those players now??? Have we again missed a trick appointing someone who works well with little money and expecting him to be just as good when he has money?

Where is the desire, fight, and guts, pride in the Everton shirt? The way we've played this season is handicapping the strengths of the team and thus we can't defend and are firing blanks most games, as we make very few genuine chances. How many shots have we had this season from outside the box?

Is the loss of Gomes and Gbamin the main cause of the rot? In my view, it's not; regardless of the team selected, we are too pedestrian and too predictable.

Watford and West Ham are massive games, and I'm also thinking that Farhad won't be wanting to pay out another payoff and almost 2 years since Ronald K, got the chop.

It's dire straits, but it will take guts to get through these darkening days at Everton.

Will the manager, coaches and squad, have the guts to fight back up the table?

I know some will champion what he has achieved in Portugal and Greece. I think I read somewhere that the reason Mr. Money Moshiri wanted him because he watched Olympiakos beat Arsenal a few years back and he was in charge at Olympiakos. So with a combination of Kenwright and 3M came up with him. Not a recipe for success!

So if I try to put the other side of the argument for MS all I can come up with is 3 debatable observations:

1. We have not replaced Gana and Zouma and that was out of his hands.

2. We have played like a team who have not bedded in because Awobi, Delph and Kean signed late. Mina is like a new signing as well as he hardly played last year. So we have played like a team who does not know each other. Not like a team but as a team. Is this Silva's fault? Or that of Mr Brands, or Mr Teflon, as nothing bad seems to stick to him at the moment!

3. How much better would we have been if his first-choice midfielders of Gomes and Gbamin! Maybe both will be fit for West Ham in 12 days. Maybe after we have paid our penance in purgatory we will win, the RS will lose and Brexit will be solved!

As you can see I am really struggling to look on the bright side of life, key Monty Python!

Maybe it's the loss of his Number Two from last season that's taken us backwards this season. We need someone in who can think outside the FIFA Coaching Manual.

So why is our board dithering? Silva is taking us nowhere except down. They know that, the fans know that, and in his heart, Silva probably knows that too. You only have to look at the man's body language. He's a beaten man, devoid of hope and ideas and it would do nobody any fsvours to drag it out until the West Ham game. And what if we win it? Are we supposed to say "Oh goody, everything is ok now?" Because it won't be of course. With the next defeat the clamour for his sacking will begin again with greater intensity, the atmosphere at Goodison will become toxic, the away support who turned against him at Burnley will drop away, and we'll have dropped more points in the fight against relegation. And make no mistake, the table doesn't lie, we're in 18th place and so, technically we are in the relegation scrap.

Silva has had over a season to produce a team at least capable of holding its own in the Premier League. Instead we're losing to newly promoted teams and others we could reasonably be expected to beat. That's relegation form in any body's language.

So why dither? The board need to be decisive, make the decision, sack our failing manager and bring in someone who can resurrect this train wreck of a season, which began with so much hope, yet has turned into a nightmare.

So why is our board dithering? Silva is taking us nowhere except down. They know that, the fans know that, and in his heart, Silva probably knows that too. You only have to look at the man's body language. He's a beaten man, devoid of hope and ideas and it would do nobody any fsvours to drag it out until the West Ham game.

And what if we win it? Are we supposed to say "Oh goody, everything is ok now?" Because it won't be of course. With the next defeat, the clamour for his sacking will begin again with greater intensity, the atmosphere at Goodison will become toxic, the away support who turned against him at Burnley will drop away, and we'll have dropped more points in the fight against relegation. And make no mistake, the table doesn't lie, we're in 18th place and so, technically we are in the relegation scrap.

Silva has had over a season to produce a team at least capable of holding its own in the Premier League. Instead, we're losing to newly promoted teams and others we could reasonably be expected to beat. That's relegation form in any body's language.

So why dither? The board need to be decisive, make the decision, sack our failing manager and bring in someone who can resurrect this train wreck of a season, which began with so much hope, yet has turned into a nightmare.

A thought-provoking post and very true.