Games with Liverpool have often been a candle-snuffer when it comes to Evertonian hopes but the leaders are resurgentIt’s the hope that kills you, as every Evertonian knows. Some scouse wag posted a comment here last week suggesting the reason Carlo Ancelotti’s side are riding so high is because performing in empty stadiums means the players are no longer jinxed by the waves of negativity and fatalism emanating from bluenoses on the terraces.This theory simply does not hold water – there were no fans in grounds at the end of last season and Everton were terrible – though the word fatalism does ring true of a generation of supporters, actually make that several generations, brought up on more or less...
Ancelotti has Everton aiming high, Manchester United need more than Cavani and flying full-backs impressedHéctor Bellerín has had his doubters over the past year. There have been suggestions a touch of his old pace has gone after long-term injury, and when PSG bid for him last month there was an argument it could be a good time for Arsenal to cash in. But Bellerín set up both goals against Sheffield United, the first after a typically barnstorming burst to the line, and is looking a touch nearer to his old self. “After such a long time at the club he doubted what ambitions he had here, how he could evolve here,” Mikel Arteta said after Arsenal’s narrow win. “But he...
Another handball horror show, Calvert-Lewin is benefiting from Ancelotti effect and sentiment alone will not save LampardOle Gunnar Solskjær said Manchester United had “three or four weeks to catch up to a few teams”, and how it showed. United could not get out to prevent crosses or track Brighton’s runners. Their lack of match sharpness is a consequence of their lack of a pre-season. It was interesting to hear Gareth Southgate say the players in his England squad in early September who had played in European competition until mid‑August were the fittest because they had, effectively, played all the way through. Solskjær has a different view and feels comfortable in advancing it as mitigation, essentially because it is not his...
It may be opening weekend optimism, but the Colombian lifted Carlo Ancelotti’s side to a level that outplayed TottenhamFirst weekends are all about hope. Fresh grass and fresh dreams. The new tactics that oppositions haven’t yet worked out, and the new players who haven’t yet been paid for. It’s a weekend for flinging perspective to one side and letting your imagination run riot, a weekend of kings and frauds and nothing in between. Mohamed Salah is back. Fulham are doomed. West Ham are in crisis. VAR is good now. And this is our year, as assuredly as all the others were before them.Naturally, all this feeds giddily into football’s rapacious content-industrial complex, where things are always being learned, where definitive...
The allure of players allowed to leave by the elite proves too great for a stepping-stone club but the Colombian’s reunion with Carlo Ancelotti may be a gamble worth takingPotential can be a curse. Show too much too early and it will define you, so you are measured not by what you have done but against the future that once seemed within your grasp. And when age finally takes its toll, when the world stops waiting for you to become what it seemed you once could be, when you are written off with a dismissive shrug as a could-have-been then, in England at least, there are really only two places you can go: West Ham or Everton.They are populated by...