People have been talking about Sean Dyche’s future as Everton manager as his record at home has not always been good and we endured the club’s longest ever winless run in the Premier League last season, but I feel while the ownership issue is up in the air, nothing is going to happen. You don’t want more mess added to our situation.
We’ve just got to trust Dyche to turn it around with this group of players. We’ve got tough games coming up and the takeover is going to take a while and only once that’s complete will we be in a position to reassess where we’re at as a football club.
I’ve felt that over the last few games, the manager has stepped away again. Last season, he said he looked at himself and the backroom staff, thought ‘what can we do?’ and turned up in his tracksuit for the game to say: ‘Look, I’m one of the team.’ That’s the way it should be. Whether he wears a shirt and tie or a tracksuit, I don’t really care, but the players have got to feel like he’s with them and he’s not throwing them under the bus because if it goes wrong, it’s everyone’s fault.
You can’t be blaming people for missing chances or making mistakes, it’s how you set up. Mistakes happen in football, but your team-mates can help you out and you can thank them later.
I think Dyche needs to learn not to be too predictable and add a bit of a surprise element to the team’s play as I believe a lot of fans would get on board with that. We need to be able to offer a different type of tactical plan because what we’re seeing is the same copy and paste where we huff and puff, wait for set-pieces, try and scrap a goal and hold on.
Unfortunately, if we concede a goal then heads go down and that’s something Dyche needs to work on with these players. They have to show that they’ve got the character to play for Everton and not just once or twice a season, they’ve got to do it week in, week out.
It only takes one player to do something out of the ordinary. We’ve seen it in recent times with Alex Iwobi doing a 30-yard run to close down an opponent, that changed the mentality of the whole season as the crowd got up for it and the players’ mentality was lifted.
Dwight McNeil tried it last year too and you can’t go running around like a headless chicken but someone in the team needs to take authority not to let the game bypass them.
Last week I was angry when I was doing my column but Everton played well for over 80 minutes against Bournemouth so can Dyche and the players keep to that level, playing football with confidence and with smiles on our faces in the games ahead? That’s what they need to do to get points on the table and get the crowd back onside.
We’ve got to remember where our next opponents Aston Villa were not that long ago. They were struggling under Steven Gerrard but have enjoyed a momentous turnaround since the new management came in, which shows to the likes of Everton that it’s possible to climb up that table given the majority of the squad remains the same.
Iroegbunam has already done more than Onana
I’m looking forward to seeing Tim Iroegbunam and Amadou Onana going head-to-head because despite his lack of experience and their respective price tags, the new lad has shown more already at Everton than Onana ever did. Onana is a fantastic player, but it just felt like the wrong team at the wrong time for him and he just didn’t fit.
Tim will want to go back to his old club and prove a point and say: ‘you shouldn’t have sold me.’ We know Onana’s strengths, he’s powerful and will want to control the game by getting on the ball very early but we also know his weaknesses so can we exploit them?
He can switch off, he doesn’t like tracking back, he can be sloppy in possession at times and will take chances.
Onana came with a lot of bluster about where he wanted to be in his football career but didn’t hit the heights expected of him, maybe through a combination of how we played, and his style didn’t suit the system too much. Fighting near the bottom of the table probably didn’t get the best out of him.
He might not have been expecting to move on to a club like Aston Villa, he was probably expecting someone with more Champions League experience but maybe those type of sides shied away from him given his performances at Everton. He’s had a good start with a couple of goals – as many as he managed for the Blues in 30 Premier League matches last season – and has already become something of a fan favourite there, as we know that he likes waving his arms around and getting the crowd up.
There was a feeling that it was the kind of transfer to help the PSR situation at each club and I was disappointed to see one of our own, Lewis Dobbin, going in the opposite direction. I wasn’t expecting Tim to be a regular part of the first team squad, but I’ve been really delighted, given his age, at how experienced he seems to be when he’s on the football pitch as the way he plays, he looks like he’s been at Everton for a long time.
He’s probably been our best player so far this season with his performances so that’s been a massive positive.
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