I think if we actually all think back to a week ago, I don’t think anyone would have expected to get a result off United or Spurs. The reality is we have lost those games due to mistakes in each game and ultimately missing chances. We are going in the right direction. There is a massive difference to a chance falling to say Che Adams and Antonio against Southampton and West Ham, to chances falling to Ronaldo and Kane. Ultimately the better players make you pay. Look at City today, dominated the game, Liverpool looked the away side, they had 40% possession and 2 shots on target, one of them went in because of a mistake and a clinical striker.
What we have to work on is getting the ball upfield and creating chances. What I have noticed is that even though we are going in the right direction there still seems to be a distinct lack of effort on target or making the goalkeeper work. It’s something that has followed us around for a few years now. Someone needs to get the ball, have a run forward and few yards and hit a shot on target, preferably within the first 15 minutes.
The goals we scored against Palace, which is a game in our recent history where we actually scored 3 goals, all of them goals came from crosses into the box with players actually being there. 2 of them where free kicks and one of them delle Alli just has a random shot which falls for Richy, we have to figure out a way to start doing this more often. How are we going to start scoring goals? When we went 1-0 up against United there was a weird atmosphere to me. It was kind of like ‘wow, we’ve scored early against United…. But hold on this feels weird… this doesn’t feel like the other games at Goodison, this feels like they are going to come back’. Once we scored we didn’t even have another chance really.
I don’t think anyone is panicking yet but Newcastle then Palace, Fulham, Leicester, Bournemouth. If we don’t start having some shots then we might aswell forget it until after the World Cup.