Column
They say that at the end of a 38-game season, the Premier League table doesn’t lie, but the 2023-24 version, flecked as it will be by asterisks near the bottom of the rankings, won’t tell the whole story. As it stands, Everton should be sitting on 44 points, level with much-vaunted Brighton & Hove Albion and with an outside chance of finishing in the top half.
Of course, because of an unprecedented double sanction, the Blues have eight points fewer than their 12 wins and eight draws would ordinarily have earned them. Thanks to Sean Dyche and the efforts of his players, however, the Club won’t be involved in another last-day battle to stay in the top flight. Indeed, with three games left to play, Everton are safe and a beleaguered fanbase can breathe a collective sigh of relief. (At least where matters on the pitch are concerned — the takeover saga remains a thorn in the psyche but is largely beyond the supporters’ influence.)
A fortnight ago, there can’t have been many Evertonians who were confident that we’d be in this position after three games in a potentially gruelling six-day spell, two against teams scrapping it down there above the relegation zone with us and one a Merseyside derby against a Liverpool outfit still trying to beat Manchester City to the League title.
The 6-0 defeat at the hands of Chelsea was the second heaviest defeat Everton have suffered in the Premier League era and, coming on the heels of a winless run of 13 matches that eclipsed the infamous record of 12 set by Mike Walker 30 years ago, it set the alarm bells ringing among fans wondering if this season would prove to be a relegation battle too far and if the man at the helm could muster the powers of motivation needed to prevent the team imploding.
Everton were a shambles at Stamford Bridge. Worse, some of the players appeared to lack fight and appreciation for the gravity of the Club’s situation, Dyche looked bereft of answers, and the whole situation felt very much like Groundhog Day: another manager overseeing a horrendous run of results and players taking flak from some quarters for appearing to down tools, all while the catastrophe of relegation loomed like a spectre ahead.
Rafael Benitez and Frank Lampard were sacked under similar circumstances. Sean Dyche, dubbed by some the luckiest manager in football, probably remained in his post for a few important reasons, among them the proximity of the end of the season, the fact that there was no one sufficiently engaged or empowered at the top of the Club to make such a big decision and Everton couldn’t afford to pay him off anyway.
In the final reckoning, it was just as well because Dyche, his staff and the Blues’ players pulled off something quite remarkable in those three games following their humiliation in the Capital. Three wins. Three clean sheets. An exorcism of a Goodison derby victory that drove a huge nail into the coffin of Liverpool’s title dreams. And Premier League safety before the calendar had flipped to May.
It’s a narrative that reinforces the adage that a season is played over 38 games and that there is an argument for steeling your nerve and sticking by a manager, even if all logic and gnawing fear are screaming the contrary. It has to be the right man, though. There was almost nothing to suggest that the deeply unpopular Benitez or the increasingly hapless Lampard would have arrested the slides in the team’s fortunes over which they were presiding by January 2022 and January 2023 respectively.
Dyche, for all his apparent limitations but to his enormous credit, was able to do what neither of his two immediate predecessors could once things started spiralling out of control – reset and refocus a struggling group, re-instill their confidence and tinker just enough with his own approach and methods (right down to his match-day get-up!) to get the right response from the team at the perfect moment.
The clash with Nottingham Forest, perhaps the most important result of the season given what it would have meant had Everton lost, was won on the back of a return to basics and the defensive solidity that had been ebbing away in the matches before the trip to Chelsea before evaporating completely on that harrowing Monday night. Key also was the return to central midfield of Idrissa Gueye who has just had, arguably, his best week as a Toffee, and the return to the scoresheet of the ceaselessly industrious Dwight McNeil.
Their goals lifted the Blues over Forest and set the stage for the magnificent conquest of Liverpool in midweek in which every player to a man raised their game. Saturday’s win over Brentford was several shades less dramatic but was important nonetheless in that it ensured mathematical safety from relegation and further underlined the transformation Dyche has overseen in such a short space of time.
It was a restorative week in terms of the manager’s standing with many of the fans; the kind of turnaround that erases much of the doubt that he should retain the reins for the final year of his contract and get the chance to earn the right to lead Everton to Bramley-Moore Dock.
That’s significant, because that painful winless run between mid-December and early April was galling, made worse by the debacle at Bournemouth and the ugly, yard-dog fare served up during the hugely fortuitous victory over struggling Burnley despite having had the ideal conditions to prepare a revival with three weeks off in March and a training camp in Portugal. All of that was then compounded to a horrifying degree by the embarrassing showing in West London two weeks ago.
In those circumstances and the mood they created, it was not unreasonable to argue that if Dyche was going to employ such one-dimensional football and maddeningly persist with certain players then, at the very least, he needed to get results. And if he couldn’t, even if the Blues remained in the Premier League for 2024-25, the arrival of any new owners would allow for a sweep of the decks and perhaps the appointment of their own man to rebuild something more long-term.
Taking more of a “30,000-foot” view, though, there is some evidence gleaned over the course of the season to suggest that Dyche could yet implement something more akin to the Everton Way given a transfer budget and a more settled environment than the chaos that has typified this season of seemingly never-ending negative news.
He may not get either.
777 Partners’ attempted buy-out remains as far away from fruition as ever but the reported £200m they will have loaned the club by season’s end has further complicated the situation vis-à-vis alternative investors by deepening the sea of debt afflicting the Club.
It also means that far from providing a war chest for the manager and Director of Football to build the squad, any sales will go towards alleviating the threat of yet another PSR sanction next season and either lessening that outstanding debt or going towards the final construction costs of the new stadium.
If nothing else, they will be familiarly choppy waters. By Dyche’s own admission, the job he has been asked to do was not the one pitched to him when he joined the Club in January last year. No doubt, the lack of any money to spend on new players to allow him to back up the stern words he expressed in the aftermath of the last-day escape from the drop a year ago was a factor behind that assessment, likewise the hefty penalties from the Premier League.
But his remark to reporters after the Saturday’s win over Brentford that “you wouldn’t imagine half of what I’ve been managing,” hints at deeper challenges behind the scenes, over and above a threadbare squad, his No.9’s lengthy goal drought, a seemingly ill-suited striking acquisition from Portugual, a mis-firing attack in general for much of the campaign, and the unquantifiable effects on the team’s morale of two separate points deductions.
Whatever happens next, despite the curiously streaky nature of the results he has overseen this term — the Toffees failed to win any of their first five League games, won eight of the next 12, went 13 without tasting another victory and has now picked up all three points in three of their last four — and the at times perplexing vagaries of Everton’s form, Dyche has proved that he represents a rare element of much-needed stability at a club still wracked by an uncertain future.