My missus could find us an ACTUAL footballer.
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My missus could find us an ACTUAL footballer.
Blue Pride of Brum
Player Valuation: £8m
You mushes are crazy. Really crazy.
Runcornblue52
Player Valuation: £8m
I agree with you . I think Koeman lost the plot in the end and it's too early to judge Allardyce but a manager should be able to get better football out of all these players we have .
We aren't a mid table club. We are a mid table team because of lack of investment and poor recruitment.
Saying we are a mid table club suggests we should just accept this. We shouldn't.
Au contaire; The defence is gash because we don't have a proper MF unit, we have DM's, wide MF's, 3 or is it 4? No. 10's, (some of whom are No.8's) and some willing runners.
But no proper midfield unit.
The game is...and always has been, won or lost in the MF
We don't have one, thus the defence is under pressure and the forward(s) has nobody making the bullets for him/them
Deckard2049
Player Valuation: £15m
We shouldn’t accept what’s going on right now, I agree with you there. But honestly with the level of finances available to us we need to be both incredibly smart and incredibly lucky to get anywhere and so far we’re doing neither. We are absolutely miles behind the top 6 and anyone who doesn’t think so is kidding themselves.
Our squad is completely mid table, we don’t have one player bar our goalkeeper who would trouble the starting 11 of last years top 6. The money we spent in the summer is absolutely nothing in the grand scale of things and let’s face it, we’ve blown the majority of it so far anyway. Some fans seem to think our owner is one of the wealthiest in the league and will finance a grand assault on the top 4. Having a billionaire owner is nothing special in this era, Stoke have one FFS. Unless we get some City level investment sometime soon it’ll take years for us to catch up, and given the finances of the “elite” it’s a monumental task. You have to spend just to keep up behind, never mind catch up and overtake. And although people think it’s a joke, AC Milan are looking at some heavy FFP penalties so that is something else we have to consider when trying to spend big.
What we can offer is premier league wages and a stepping stone to bigger clubs. That’s a horrible thing to have to write, but it’s the truth. It’s what we did with Stones and Lukaku. I’ve said this before, but the next generation of footballers were not even born when we last won a trophy. If you were born in 1996, you’re 21. What impression of Everton do you have? Especially right now with Sam Allardyce as manager? Because to me right now we look like we don’t have a clue what we’re doing. Even someone like that Cenk Tosun- he’s (potentially) coming here for money and a chance to impress in a better league and maybe even get another big move before he retires. He doesn’t give a monkeys about our history or status.
What really tops all this off is right now we don’t have a proper identity, a proper style of football or even a proper team. It’s a mess of players cobbled together in the summer with a manager who doesn’t fit them at all- although to be fair I think the team is so unbalanced most would struggle. We have no pace, no attacking threat whatsoever and passing along the deck seems alien most of the time to this team. They won’t play great football, but at least Burnley know what they’re about. Same goes for Bournemouth. Even Leicester play some decent stuff and have some flair, pace and guile about them. The issue for me every game is quite simply I don’t know what an Everton goal looks like anymore. I don’t know what the plan is to score. I can see the plan for not conceding. But the other half of our game is atrocious.
We had our moment in the summer to really capitalise and push on this season and quite simply we blew it. Already Allardyce is saying that you won’t see the best of us till next year. God help us if we go out the FA Cup on Friday. Just another five months of torture left. At least there’s a World Cup this summer ay.
Runcornblue52
Player Valuation: £8m
Not when our most expensive player spends his entire life working back to cover an incompetent fullback.......Sorry but you're wrong !
I agree with everything you have written but.... We should at least be able to compete with Spurs. Right now we are miles behind them also.
We have slipped backwards since Moshiri took over and that is mainly down to the people he has appointed. Plus all this talk of increased investment etc looks now to be just a cynical attempt to play the fans as fools.
If he appointed well and we kept pace with the teams above us then the lack of extra investment wouldn't be much of an issue but now it is and it's up to him to sort out the mess not just for him to expect us to accept our new place in the football pyramid.
Cuco isnt the best true, but we've had poor players at FB before.
My key point about the game being won and lost in the MF is totally valid. Everbody gets up, everybody gets back, everybody covers, tackles, passes.
The MF is, or should be, a block, a unit, that should function as a whole, forwards, backwards, flowing, expanding, contractng, keeping its overall shape..not a collection of individuals.
I've seen them, played in a few. Trust me on this - Mid Field is the key to all footy.
Runcornblue52
Player Valuation: £8m
I'm well aware of how vital midfield is ....but when the midfield have to cover inadequate defenders .their effect is nullified . They are always looking back instead of forward . Hopefully we get a decent left back and the others can sort themselves out .
Toffee in Jandals
Player Valuation: £35m
To me it's a combo of personnel and tactics. If we play with four at the back, two defensive-oriented midfielders (or three in today's case), and Lennon who seems to feel he has to cover for his fulback, it seems like most days we have only two, or at best three, attack-minded players, with no central midfielder who is capable enough to play the defence-splitting pass (Rooney aside, who I feel should play there).
When we played with two defensive midfielders in the "72 points" season, we had Baines and Coleman in their prime bombing on from the fullback position, while now Kenny and Martina are nowhere near that sort of level. Also helps when you have Barkley making forward runs, and Lukaku knocking in chances for fun.
If we bin Schneiderlin and McCarthy and play with only one DM in Gueye, we'll look better going forward I'm sure. Davies blows hot and cold at the moment (not surprising given his youth) so I'd like to see Rooney drop back to central midfield, a couple of wide-men (perhaps Lookman/Bolasie/Vlasic/Lennon) with Siggy playing behind a centre-forward. That's the dream anyway.
...thought the most telling bit of Allardyce’s post match interview was him saying something along the lines of: “we have to be very strong at the back because we’re so poor at the other end of the pitch”.
He went on about our lack of a goalscorer, i’m more concerned about our lack of creativity.
He went on about our lack of a goalscorer, i’m more concerned about our lack of creativity.
allezlesbleus
Player Valuation: £35m
I think too many of our key players are "safe/defensive minded" who are content to knock a short ball to a team mate regardless of whether he is in a better position up the field or not. This was praised up to a point under RM who could not get them to sustain the high intensity purple patches needed to turn games which they did in his first season. Koeman talked a lot about a high intensity brand of football but never came close to showing he had the players to deliver it and seemed to encourage long balls delivered from our least skilful players at the back to one usually isolated forward up front. Allardyce has continued that and added and extremely cautious attitude and a couple of team selections that have addressed the leaky defence issue but made the poor creativity/lack of anything in the last third issue even worse. Like @degsy I worry about where the midfield comes into Sam's thinking. We seem to have any combination of lads in there who play safe passes but sit back and concede territory when we have not got the ball without looking too keen to get up and support the attacker when we do.
The usual 4-2-3-1 makes us very narrow and usually means 6 of 10 outfield players are mainly defensively minded. When Baines and Coleman were bombing on 3 years ago it was not defensive as such. It is at the moment though. If any one or two of the 3-1 up front are ineffective we really struggle to create. Most players have relatively few options when in possession because our movement off the ball is pretty dire. I can't work out whether that is lack of vision/intelligence or tactics or probably age with a few who just can't do it like they used to. We have definitely signed several players whose impact has been virtually non-existant who have just not hit the ground running. They look like in their heads they are still at their previous teams and that is if they get any game time at all.
The recruitment in the last two windows has not made us stronger anywhere in the pitch which is a disaster and will set us back two seasons development. Sam's alleged man-management skills are going to be needed because I don't think there will be 5 top class players arriving in the January window to change this. So like it or not he has to get more commitment from these guys, more movement off the ball when in possession, greater commitment to winning individual battles when out of possession. He also has to get a set up which moves us 30 yards higher up the pitch. It is obvious he is protecting the defence but we have to try to get more possession and make games happen more in enemy territory than the last two shambles.
The usual 4-2-3-1 makes us very narrow and usually means 6 of 10 outfield players are mainly defensively minded. When Baines and Coleman were bombing on 3 years ago it was not defensive as such. It is at the moment though. If any one or two of the 3-1 up front are ineffective we really struggle to create. Most players have relatively few options when in possession because our movement off the ball is pretty dire. I can't work out whether that is lack of vision/intelligence or tactics or probably age with a few who just can't do it like they used to. We have definitely signed several players whose impact has been virtually non-existant who have just not hit the ground running. They look like in their heads they are still at their previous teams and that is if they get any game time at all.
The recruitment in the last two windows has not made us stronger anywhere in the pitch which is a disaster and will set us back two seasons development. Sam's alleged man-management skills are going to be needed because I don't think there will be 5 top class players arriving in the January window to change this. So like it or not he has to get more commitment from these guys, more movement off the ball when in possession, greater commitment to winning individual battles when out of possession. He also has to get a set up which moves us 30 yards higher up the pitch. It is obvious he is protecting the defence but we have to try to get more possession and make games happen more in enemy territory than the last two shambles.
thirdmantackle
Player Valuation: £35m
as much criticism as Martinez got, the players were able to pass the ball under him and hold onto possession.
it must all come down to coaching under Koeman and BFS, the philosophy of the manager (what he's telling them to do) and confidence of the players
what you do in training is replicated on the match day.
it must all come down to coaching under Koeman and BFS, the philosophy of the manager (what he's telling them to do) and confidence of the players
what you do in training is replicated on the match day.
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