A Sean Dyche side winning at Turf Moor with a goal from a Dwight McNeil corner and a second from Michael Keane. Too much narrative, if anything.
There are lots of teams having extraordinary Barclays seasons, but Everton must surely now be top of that particular pile.
After five games they’d managed only two goals and a single point – and all of those had come in one game at a Sheffield United side busying itself getting beaten by absolutely everyone else.
Another grim fight against relegation after two successive escapes appeared to be on the cards. Since which time they’ve played another 12 games and picked up 25 points, still managed to lose at home to Luton alongside defeats to Liverpool and Manchester United, and have seen 10 of those 25 points taken off them by the Premier League.
In early September when Everton were losing a fourth game of five without scoring, the idea of them being seven points clear of the bottom three was a fanciful one; the idea of them being seven points clear after being hit with a 10-point deduction beyond preposterous.
The first game after the 10-point penalty was a 3-0 defeat to Manchester United. Everton haven’t conceded a goal since, with four straight wins lifting them back out of the bottom three, wiping out the penalty altogether and tonight adding a couple of points on top for good measure.
To put that run in some kind of perspective, a net return of two points from their last five games puts them above Crystal Palace and Nottingham Forest in the form table over that period. It puts them only four points behind Manchester City and five behind Spurs.
There is now a sense of expectation around this side. Everton have always, even at their lowest ebbs, retained the ability to pluck an unlikely result from the depths of their arse. But they were never a side about whom you could reliably predict or expect such things – at least until such victories became necessary to avoid relegation.
The speed with which that has changed is staggering. Everton turned up at Burnley tonight and you just fully expected them to win, and you could confidently predict the precise manner in which they would do so. They would do it by playing like Burnley used to when this was Sean Dyche’s manor.
If anything, Everton’s opening goal coming from a big lad overpowering a smaller, weaker defender to get on the end of a Dwight McNeil corner was a bit too on the nose. Having Michael Keane score the second so soon after Amadou Onana’s opener was just gilding the lily.
Everton have become a very good Sean Dyche side very quickly this season, and there is an inherent sustainability to this current run. Because it is based so proudly and effectively on the Dyche fundamentals. They probably will concede a goal again at some point. They probably won’t just win all their games for ever and ever. Their next two league games are against Spurs and City, which will at the very least put significant pressure on that run of clean sheets. But they are going to pick up results consistently and reliably now. This is who they have become, and it’s something they have so rarely been in recent years.
Relegation is already an irrelevant point of discussion. The seven-point cushion in the actual table is telling enough; the 17-point on-field cushion confirmation that the gap will only grow and grow. Only further punishment could drag Everton back into that question, and it would need to be a sizeable punishment.
What’s more interesting is just how high they might yet climb. The thought at the time of the penalty – already proved emphatically correct – was that this wasn’t a bad time to get the 10 points out of the way. A punishment that would have utterly condemned them in either of the last two seasons could much more easily be overcome this time around with an improving Everton far better and the bottom three far weaker than in those campaigns.
What wasn’t really being talked about then but must now is whether that 10-point penalty might in fact cost them European football. It’s entirely moot but entirely irresistible – and we’ll never know whether Everton would have become quite so ruthless without the righteous anger to fuel them – but with those 10 points back they would now sit one point behind seventh-placed Manchester United.
They might well muster more points this season than United. Frankly, they might still finish above them even with the punishment. It’s been an astonishing effort and while Burnley’s obvious desire to move in a different direction may pay dividends in the long run right now they look a long way behind their former master’s new side. Even with a 10-point headstart.
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