Please, Moyes... Mix It Up at the back!

Michael Keane (L) and James Tarkowski of Everton celebrate following the team's victory in the Premier League match between Fulham and Everton

(Photo by Peter Nicholls/Getty Images)

It has been abundantly clear all season long that James Tarkowski and Michael Keane do not work together as a pairing. In all honesty, it’s been clear a lot longer than that.

Let’s just go back to the start of last season. Since then, Keane and Tarkowski have played 34 Premier League games together. Everton have lost 15 of those matches, but have also averaged 1.4 goals against per game.

In the same time, in the 29 times Jarrad Branthwaite has played alongside Tarkowski, Everton have lost eight matches, while their average goals against drops to 1.0. With Jake O’Brien and Tarkowski playing together, it’s three wins from four matches, and 0.25 goals against per game.

You catch my drift.

And this is not just a Keane issue. The problem is that the partnership is simply not suited — the flaws of both players are exposed.

It is frankly ludicrous that Keane has played so much this season. And this is not to dig out Keane, who it must be said has arguably performed better than Tarkowski at times.  He stayed on last summer as fourth-choice centre-back, yet he is on 31 league appearances.

O’Brien, meanwhile, has continued to be shunted out on the right, despite playing well whenever called upon in his actual position. But really, it all boils down to Everton’s issues at right-back and, perhaps even more crucially, David Moyes’ refusal to trust one of his options.

It’s clear that Tarkowski and Branthwaite are Moyes’ first choice in the middle, but with the latter’s injury issues, that has exposed Everton’s failure to address the right-back position last summer, and in January.

But it has also exposed the flaw in Moyes’ thinking — that stubbornness with the Scot that can drive even his most ardent of supporters up the wall.

We’ll possibly look back at Branthwaite’s season-ending injury, suffered late in the Merseyside derby, as the moment Everton’s campaign died. Since then, they have shipped eight goals in three-and-a-bit matches.

And it comes down, at least in part, to Moyes’ refusal to see Nathan Patterson as a feasible right-back option.

I really do struggle to see how Moyes can have looked at the recent performances, defensively, against West Ham and Manchester City, and decided it was right to stick with the tried and tested (and poor) defence for the trip to Crystal Palace.

However, if he does it again against Sunderland, then frankly he deserves all the criticism he will get if it goes wrong.

Patterson is far from perfect and does not have a future at the club, but he is a right-back, and there is no way that it’s worth the trade-off of then sticking with O’Brien in that role, looking clunky and disjointed, and having to go with Keane and Tarkowski in the middle. It’s just not working.

And if Moyes really can’t bring himself to start Patterson, even just for the final two matches of the season, then do something different.

Could James Garner slot in there, and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall drop deeper in a midfield three, perhaps alongside Merlin Rohl and Tim Iroegbunam, if Idrissa Gueye is not fit?

I for one would not want to see Garner taken out of midfield, so it just comes back to, for the sake of two matches, putting Patterson in, for the sake of balance; for the sake of not persisting with a pair of veteran campaigners who are looking worse by the week.

Moyes’s refusal to change from his preferred pecking order has cost Everton — make no mistake. He can point to experience all he wants; ultimately, that experience is not delivering results.

The numbers do not paint a pretty picture. Everton have the fourth-worst expected goals against (xGA) figure in the Premier League this season.

In the last couple of weeks, that has caught up with them. They are still the league’s biggest xGA to goals conceded overperformers (conceding 46 times from 54.6 xGA), but as we have seen, when your luck starts to turn, it proves costly.

Moyes simply has to change it. He has to get out of his own way. There are two games left and if Everton are going to have a chance of Europe, they realistically have to win both of them, or at the very least take four points and hope for huge favours elsewhere.

He has the chance to be brave, rather than falling back on his pragmatic nature. That means playing somebody else at right-back and ditching one of Tarkowski or Keane — neither of them are playing well enough to demand a place, anyway.

Everton’s attackers have missed chances as of late, and big ones at that, but a team cannot be expected to score three or more goals to have to win a game.

Please, Moyes, see what everyone else can see. Make the change.

Stats courtesy of Opta’s Aaron Barton on X

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