Would be interesting to see the win % stats for Everton games since Gueye left and when Doucoure isn’t playing. I’d wager it’s not very high. Why? Because if you don’t have the necessary pace and power to compete in midfield and earn possession you cannot consistently win football matches. Some on this site seem to have a blind spot on this and just expect that a midfield of Allan Davies Siggurdson Gomes etc. will somehow outplay any premier league midfield despite giving up so much in pace and power.
That’s why
@ForeverBlue92 said Docuoure was our most important player. I said a few weeks back that if one of Doucoure or Allan (but especially Docuoure) got injured then the wheels would fall off the team and so it’s proved. The same thing happened to Silva once Gueye was sold and Gbamin didn’t replace him in the same way. The same thing was happening to Ancelotti at the end of last season once Docuoure got injured.
Our best 11 is a top half level counterattacking team with two very good forwards, a very good box to box midfielder, and a towering centre back in Mina. That’s the spine of the team, we can accommodate the weaker players (to a point) around these key players. What’s effectively happened to Benitez is he’s lost the entire spine of the team to injury. Everton fans seem to just have completely ignored this though and are perplexed as to why Keane Davies Iwobi Rondon don’t perform the same way and we’ve started losing.
I’ve said before there’s very little any manager in the world can do with our players outside of a certain group (Mina Digne Allan Docuoure DCL Richarlison Gray Townsend) tactically because they are just not good enough to carry ANY tactical ideas or aspects of the game out. Keane Davies Coleman would struggle to out together any sort of basic passing move even under little pressure.
As long as we continue to keep missing Mina Doucoure DCL etc. we’ll keep losing games and there’s nothing Rafael Benitez, Carlo Ancelotti, Marco Silva, Sam Allardyce, Robald Koeman, Pep Guardiola, Graham Potter or this mythical manager we should replace Benitez with can do about it.
The blame lies solely with the Everton board and Marcel Brands (and Koeman/Walsh before him) who have bought poor players, mismanaged the ffp situation, and have presided over the most embarrassing medical department in the league.
Firing another manager will achieve absolutely nothing. If anyone can give a single name worthy of consideration who is available, and would consider joining us, and brings a guarantee that they’d fare better than Benitez, then it’s worth a debate but I can’t think of a single one. The reason for that is I have seen Keane Coleman Davies Iwobi Siggurdson Kenny etc. fail under every single manager they’ve had in every single tactical system we’ve tried.
Look at the start of the season ffs. Confidence high, Southampton at home, pre season behind them and within the first 45 mins of the season Michael Keane has already fallen over a ball doing something inane with it leading to us conceding. Do you think that’s off of utter moronic play is in Benitez’s tactical plan? Or that he wouldn’t keep doing that sort of stupid stuff under any other manager? Of course he would! We saw Tom Davies absolutely take the knees out of the team against Burnley at home under Ancelotti through similar stupidity miscontrolling and dwelling in possession.
They are uncoachable, unprofessional, crap league one players who need punting from this squad as quickly as possible before another manager is fired. The moment Brands gave Keane a contract extension I knew we were running a comedy rat ship not an elite high performance football team.
Everton v Spurs at the weekend. No doubt the usual lot will moan on here when we don’t win (which we probably won’t) and blame Benitez for it but football isn’t a game based on emotion, ‘if we just want it a bit more than the opposition we’ll win’. It’s complete nonsense and even if it did work like that I doubt those players who will be in the 11 would even beat a lacklustre team like Spurs in the desire stakes. Football is about tactical strategies, and how effectively they are carried out by the players on the pitch.
Conte has numerous tactical strategies available to him based on the composition of the squad he has. He has the players in almost every position (except perhaps CB) to go with whatever formation he wants and if it doesn’t work he has the options to change it. Benitez has pretty much one option available to him, it’s the same option that Silva and Ancelotti turned to as it’s the only one this group of players has any chance with, sit deep and play on the counter hoping for a set piece. If this doesn’t work, he has. I options on the bench to go with anything different, and tbh his confidence in the players even being able to carry out this one tactic is probably extremely low.
We don’t have the pace to outrun Spurs, we don’t have the physicality to our power them, we don’t have the creativity to outplay them, we don’t have the height to better them on set pieces. The only way we win this game is for Benitez to be absolutely perfect tactically, hope that none of our useless players make a single mistake, and hope that Spurs make quite a few. Conte has probably minimised the risk of the latter happening.
I’m sorry to put it in such blunt terms but people don’t seem to be getting it, I don’t know how many more years of watching the same failings under different managers it takes before people start accepting that any football line up that contains the names Coleman Keane Davies Siggurdson Iwobi are highly unlikely to win a game of football. Combine this with the rest of the lineup missing what decent players we do have then we are almost certainly not going to win games of football which is why our top half form under previous managers (Silva, Ancelotti, and first few games under Benitez) turns into relegation form in the blink of an eye with a few injuries, and when you have the worst medical department in the league, this is always likely to happen.
The only saving grace is that it’s happened before January.
