Snap Back To Reality

There is no problem with being disappointed when your team loses.

There is no problem with being fed up when your team plays crap.

We watch football with the hopes of our side being the winner. Full stop.

And yet, unless you are one of the top five sides in the league, your team will win less than half of their games.

If you are one of the bottom five sides in the league, your team will actually LOSE at least half of their games.

But as football fans – or indeed, sports fans in general – this reality is lost in the passion we hold for our team.

It is rarely acknowledged, and even less understood.

Last season, 50% of Premier League teams finished either exactly or within one position of where the bookies estimated they would.

A further 30% finished within two or three places of the prediction.

That leaves only four teams who managed a differential of between four and five positions: overachieving Villa and Bournemouth, and underachieving United and Brentford.

Everton had been predicted to finish 15^th in Sean Dyche’s first full season in charge.

Discounting points deductions, they achieved enough results to finish 12^th.

On paper, they were the biggest overachievers outside of Villa and Bournemouth.

However, for a club that had become accustomed to a consistent place in the top 8, the scent of failure lingers on any bottom-half finish.

Without going into a tedious ‘big club’ debate, it is worth mentioning the concept for the context of this piece.

You have to earn your place in the league table, but if people were asked to position clubs based on historical and cultural significance then Everton would be in the top 10.

And it is this idea that emboldens Evertonians to demand much more than the current situation really allows.

People talk about ‘teams like Fulham’ despite the unfortunate reality that, at the moment, Everton are on a similar level competitively to these sides.

Tangible things like resources and squad quality determine how competitive you can be, not your club’s name recognition or how well you were doing a decade ago.

And Everton’s resources and squad quality have been decimated during what is now years’ worth of off-field turmoil.

To suddenly ignore this after a relatively comfortable finish to last season is unrealistic.

Realism is realising that you aren’t out of the hole yet, but if you can grit your teeth and survive for another 6 months then help is on its way.

Prior to this season, 2024/25, the bookies estimated Everton would finish 16^th.

And 11 games into the campaign, they still predict that.

Which basically means Everton are doing no better or worse than expected.

Of course, just because your situation is crap doesn’t make it easier when crap things happen.

It doesn’t matter how likely defeat is against certain teams, because it still stings regardless.

The fact remains, though, that when you have one of the bottom sides you are not going to win often.

You will not go into many games as favourites, and probably never away from home.

This has proven to be the case, with Everton the bookies’ underdogs at Leicester, Ipswich and West Ham, as well as at Goodison against Newcastle.

Objectively speaking, taking 6 points from these games is a decent return when you were backed to take 1 or 2 at best.

On the other hand, fixtures where the odds are tilted more closely must be taken advantage of (Bournemouth, Fulham, Southampton).

A level of objectivity has to be injected into the optimism and hopes we will always hold for our team.

Everton are a boxer still fighting their way off the mat.

Their cornerman is limited and will never make them a champion.

But at the same time, they’ve been fighting without a gum shield for two years now and can’t afford a new one.

In these circumstances the priority remains to avoid a knockout, so a defence-first approach frustrates fans who want a better spectacle.

An American businessman watches on with interest, whose funding provides some hope that things can finally start to turn around.

A new cornerman will be brought in, and some new sparring partners.

Not to mention a brand new gym.

The climb is always longer than the fall, and Evertonians are finding that out the hard way.

It is a slog, but much of it necessary.

Given some of the dire football we have to witness, nostalgia sets in and people think back to happier times.

But these memories can result in false comparisons –  to seasons when circumstances and expectations were drastically different to the current situation, team and resources.

What does it matter if another manager finished 8^th – they had a squad of players who had just finished 7^th, not 16^th and 17^th consecutively.

If we apply no context then everything is meaningless, much like the idea that Burnley finally getting relegated was a shocker – they were favourites for relegation every year, so keeping them up for five seasons must have some weight, objectively.

Everton hired a manager for the situation they were in, not for the situation they aspired to be in.

It wasn’t the time to get a manager to push them on, when the only requirement was to keep them up.

It was February and the club were favourites to be relegated, so staying up was not just some box-ticking exercise.

Whether we like it or not (and understandably, we don’t), the current period of bottom-half struggle is necessary in the club’s recovery.

This is specifically what Dyche was brought in to oversee, because of his experience of the situation at Burnley.

His limitations as a bottom-half manager were irrelevant because the squad was never going to be good enough to exceed them before the end of his contract this summer, when he will rightly depart.

It has been a case of putting long-term stability over short-term progress, and stabilisers aren’t much fun.

That doesn’t mean Dyche was the only man for the job, and he still has to hold up his end of the deal or he will get the boot.

But, given the state of the club, it wasn’t supposed to be pretty whatever way you cut it.

Despite a bleak few years for the club, Evertonians should never lose their hopes, their optimism or their belief.

But just because you really want your team to win, it does not make it any more likely.

Hearts are overruling heads in many cases regarding the squad’s ability, leading to disproportionate reactions to certain results.

Ultimately, there is no point expecting to compete at heavyweight level while you are still 20 pounds under the weight limit.