October followed the trend of recent months with up and down form from Everton with mixed results and extremely mixed performances. Four games saw victories at Goodison over West Ham and Watford in the Carabao Cup the bright spots while losses at Burnley and Brighton were disappointing and frustrating to say the least.
Burnley away was the first game and it was largely a performance to forget as the Blues were simply woeful on the day and this awful performance was doubly annoying when we entertained West Ham and quite simply blew them away. Talk about chalk and cheese, Jekyll and Hyde… the Everton that completely outclassed a previously unbeaten on the road West Ham were a joy to watch and the only surprise was that the Hammers didn’t go back south with a much, much heavier defeat.
Anticipation amongst the fans was therefore high when the boys in Blue headed south to Brighton only for a somewhat tepid showing, albeit in poor conditions actually saw the team come from behind to lead on strikes from Richarlison and DCL. But then fate in the shape of the diabolically employed VAR took centre stage as Lee Mason decided that Michael Keane’s accidental contact on Connolly warranted a penalty. Brighton scored to level, Everton didn’t react positively enough and sods law saw the game lost to an unfortunate OG from Lucas Digne.
This result heaped more pressure on the players and manager Marco Silva for the final game of the month, the home tie against bottom-of-the-table Watford. A thoroughly forgettable first half saw an improvement after the interval and eventually Mason Holgate capped a fine game with the opening goal courtesy of a delightful cross from Theo Walcott. And an excellent added-on time through ball from Cenk Tosun gave Richarlison the chance to secure a quarter final berth with a fine finish.
Three points from a possible nine and progression in the cup was certainly less than was expected and less than was needed, but that’s all we managed and it means the Blues will have to improve massively through November before the stiff looking fixtures scheduled for December.
Nineteen players again saw varying levels of game time in October with only three, Jordan Pickford, Lucas Digne and Richarlison completing all four games. In terms if the four Man of the Match polls, they were won by four different players, Yerry Mina at Burnley, Andre Gomes against West Ham, Djibril Sidibe at Brighton and Mason Holgate in the cup victory over Watford. Not surprisingly, the biggest poll response was for the West Ham game with the lowest coming for the loss away at Brighton.
As in the last couple of seasons, we do our utmost to post match reports and MotM polls as quickly as possible after each game, and we encourage all our forum members and readers to continue to support the effort and vote.
So, if you’re reading this via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or any other social media platform and you’re not a GOT member but want to vote each game, simply register to join the Forum – http://www.grandoldteam.com/forum/ – and cast your vote every game… and join in the myriad of discussions on the award-winning, biggest and best Everton Forum on the internet.
Having dispensed with the ubiquitous plug for GOT, the forum and polls, let’s get to the golden envelope business and on with the top three vote recipients and the PotM result, and in time honoured fashion, here’s the result in ascending order of the votes cast.
And October was one of the closest results we’ve had with only seventeen votes separating the top three players as voted for by you, the fans.
In third place and a growing crowd favourite was… Yerry Mina
In second place after a solid return to first team action and a vital cup goal was… Mason Holgate
And the congratulations go, with 17% of the total votes cast, to the GOT Player of the Month for October… Andre Gomes.
