So I’m just going to start off this article with a little quote from my post about the Merseyside Derby…
“The typical Everton stuff really, dragging you through every emotion known to man, bringing you to the peak of joy and then hurting you in places you didn’t even know you had.”
Still rings true doesn’t it? Can’t even remember the last time I genuinely thought we were consistently good for a sustained period of time. Reading back on my article after the derby (titled, “A Turning Point?” Yeah, well played Adam) it is especially my closing quote that hurts… “If that doesn’t change our season, I don’t know what will.” And you know what? I still don’t know what is going to change our season and, to be honest, I’m even having trouble putting my finger on what the problem might be. I ended up posing that question to Twitter and the replies that I got were all damning, unique issues. The biggest problem was that I was finding it tricky to argue with most of them. I’ll go through a few…
One issue that was raised was that, last season, we were the “new kids on the block” almost; teams didn’t really know how to properly deal with us and our new style of play. This season though, we’ve been found out, and there’s no plan B anywhere in sight. If our current formation doesn’t work, we don’t show any initiative to make the sort of drastic change that might be needed. How hard would it honestly have been to play two up front tonight? Even when Hull equalised, straight away we should be throwing another striker on surely? It’s as if Martinez has a system, a style that he drills in to his players, but when the going gets tough he either doesn’t want to change it to suit a particular game or our players just plain don’t know how to. That’s a massive problem for us. It’s not often that a team can play with one set style and still find consistent results; and, to be frank, I’m not sure we have the quality through our squad to be able to implement that and be successful with it. We need to start identifying our opponent’s weaknesses a little more and setting up our starting XI to exploit them. We did that to some extent when we demolished Arsenal last season (good times) by playing Lukaku where they weren’t expecting him to play. We know how to change our style up, so why don’t we?
Is it because we’re playing players out of position a little too much? Maybe it is. Especially the three attacking midfielders that we play have been subjected to a lot of chop and change so far this season. Barkley hasn’t played a lot so far this campaign, but when he has he’s been on the wing rather than his natural position behind the striker. In fact, I can list almost nine players that have played on the wing for us at some point this season. Of those players, I would say about four of them were natural wide-men. Maybe that’s because we haven’t got a big enough squad, maybe it’s because we’ve faced a LOT of injuries this season (in basically all positions we’ve been really blighted this campaign). Either way, this is something that does need to change if we want to progress. At some point it will mean being ruthless, leaving out one of the more prominent players in our squad, but surely that shows how far we’ve come as a club? I want teams to envy the options we have coming off the bench; not throw all our cards on the table straight away, in the process trying to fit square players in to round formations. We probably do need a bit of investment to try and achieve this goal permanently, but why don’t we utilise the loan market to its full potential like last season?
I still don’t believe that this team of players can just turn in to a bad team in the space of a few months. We’ve hit a bad run of form at the minute but our performances in the Europa League prove that we can be everything that we need to be. We’re in the weird situation were we could do with learning from ourselves to try and improve our own form? I’m not going to try and predict us turning it around again, we all know where that led last time, all I will say is that things will turn around for us this season.
Eventually.
@Adam_Jones94