Steven Pienaar never scored many goals.
Same with Arteta.
Why does Bernard need goals to be a success? He's not a goalscorer, never has been, never will be.
He's a brilliant player, who creates chances and brings the best out of those around him.
You're right on all those counts individually, but I still kind of disagree with the conclusion.
I really like Bernard, and he absolutely makes us better as a team, which is exactly what Pienaar did. Pienaar was brilliant for us, but he was probably also one of the reasons why we never quite made that push into the top 4 and were always just behind. He was a really good player and knitted things together brilliantly, but other teams had really good players who knitted things together and also contributed goals and direct assists. When some of our competitors needed someone to step up to the plate these players often did it themselves, while Pienaar would keep playing nice little passes etc but rely on other people to actually deliver the killer blow. That's genuinely not a criticism (he's one of my favourite Everton players) just a genuine observation of the level he was at.
Does Bernard need to score more goals to be a
relative success here? No, not at all. He's a key part of the team for me and is a brilliant player to watch, the fans love him. Does he need to score more goals to be an
actual success here? I would say yes. We will struggle to win trophies and compete at the top end of the league if one of the players in a key attacking position for us doesn't make many direct contributions to goals.
We're a decent side but not a great one, so the huge majority of our games this season have been close affairs. Many of the games in our bad run we gave pretty much as good as we got but didn't take our chances to get the points. The Arsenal game on sunday wasn't particularly dissimilar to many other games this season, only this time we didn't get punished for bad misses. If Bernard (not just him obviously but this is his thread) only scores 1-2 goals a season when playing as one of our key attackers, then we'll always have that problem, and always be mid table.