Sports Card Blogs

Everton and Silva get what they need, but it’s only the start

The relief around a rain-drenched and nerve-shredded Goodison Park was palpable. Everton, having won one of their last eight Premier League games to tumble from sixth into the bottom half, were clinging on to a 1-0 lead that was beginning to look as slippery as the conditions before Ademola Lookman started a counter-attack that ended with his cross squeezed home via a deflection by substitute Dominic Calvert-Lewin.

The three points lift Everton back into the top half, and Marco Silva will not worry too much about the performance on a day when a result was all important. For Everton, three points were a minimum requirement as they bid for the minimum requirement of a seventh-placed finish.

Silva’s three spells in the Premier League have followed a remarkably similar path; at Hull, Watford and now Everton initially promising starts have come unstuck after a dozen or so games. He is clearly a talented manager, and we basically want nothing more than for him to win the league if only to irritate the Soccer Saturday gang, but his rise in English football has been rapid, built on potential rather than return.

Unlike at Hull and Watford, though, we will now found out whether there is substance to Silva. Whether he can end the slump and turn it around. That’s why today feels important; Southampton, Huddersfield, Wolves and Watford are Everton’s next four opponents. They now have the opportunity.

Everton started the game like a team with one win in eight games. Luckily for them, Bournemouth started it like a team with only two wins since October, and shorn of their main goal threat in Callum Wilson. David Brooks dallied when through on goal and, as the angle narrowed, could only place the ball onto the past rather than inside it.

While Bournemouth were typically neat and tidy but maddeningly uncertain in the final third, Everton were nothing much of anything in a forgettable opening half-hour.

There were 34 minutes on the clock before Everton gave a Bournemouth defence that had conceded 15 in four games anything to think about. That it was Lookman who was about to pull the trigger before Nathaniel Clyne took the ball off his toe six yards out was no surprise.

He had already looked Everton’s likeliest source of impression, and was involved in two more moments of note before the break, fizzing a low cross across a strikerless six-yard line before splitting the defence with a pass that Seamus Coleman ought to have done more with than cross tamely into the first defender. Nevertheless, the corner led to a Lucas Digne cross headed onto the top of the crossbar by Michael Keane.

Everton, though, remained without a shot on target against such a leaky defence as the half-time whistle blew with the home fans frustrated with both some eccentric officiating and the limitations of their own side.

The opening goal, powered home by an unmarked Kurt Zouma from Lucas Digne’s cross, settled nerves initially. But Everton spent most of the remaining half-hour on the back foot until the second goal came with almost the final kick of the game.

It’s a result that eases some of the pressure results and Farhad Moshiri’s honest if perhaps carelessly frank observation that the club’s current position was ‘not good enough’. But it needs to be the start of something more.

This was, for the most part, a forgettable game in trying conditions between two sides desperately searching for form. For Bournemouth it is unlikely to be anything more than that; they are unlikely to be dragged into the relegation picture and are under no pressure to climb the table despite briefly threatening to be this season’s Burnley.

But Silva and Everton need this to be a catalyst. After four straight wins at Goodison, Everton had gone four without a victory. Ending that run leaves them just two short of seventh – the only acceptable finishing position after a summer of heavy investment. Silva’s complaints about the budgets of the top six have truth to them, but that cuts both ways when Everton are so far away from even touching the glass ceiling they are attempting to smash.

This was nervy. It was rarely convincing. But this forgettable, damp January afternoon could yet be a significant moment for a team and a manager trying to find their place.

Dave Tickner