A 4-0 defeat at Everton a year ago, shortly after losing 1-0 at Anfield, ended City’s title hopes. As they visit Liverpool, the transformation has been remarkableAlmost exactly a year ago, Pep Guardiola was on Merseyside conceding defeat in the title race, a comprehensive 4-0 mauling at Everton having confirmed the widespread suspicion that Manchester City were not in any shape to catch Chelsea at the top of the table. A great deal can change in 12 months though. Just ask Everton, whose day could scarcely have gone any better, with Tom Davies grabbing his first goal for the club and Ademola Lookman completing the rout by scoring on his debut.Yet even that version of Everton, confident and compact, willing...
Allardyce has made Everton hard to beat but the attacking play has been poor and, starting against Tottenham Hotspur, needs to improve if he is going to be kept on by the club’s hierarchySince becoming Everton’s majority shareholder in 2016, Farhad Moshiri has developed a reputation for being a man who does not understand that all publicity is not necessarily good publicity. This has been seen through his often toe-curling briefings to Sky Sports’ Jim White and once again at Everton’s AGM on Tuesday when the Iranian-born businessman claimed Romelu Lukaku rejected a contract with the club last summer because “he had a voodoo”. Lukaku, who is Catholic and not prone to making career decisions based on the advice of...
Mark Robins’ eye-catching Coventry deserve their headlines, Liverpool have a bargain in Andrew Robertson and Wolves are already good enough for top flightAmid all the hoopla over the departing Mark Hughes, it is right to take a moment to praise Coventry City. They were deserved winners of the third-round tie at the Ricoh Arena, despite giving up the greater number of chances to the visitors. The Sky Blues played with a determination and energy you might expect of a team assuming the David role in a Goliath encounter. But they were also calm on the ball and often quite cute on it, too. Their play was all the more striking, given the starting XI had an average age of 24...
Everton’s loss can be England’s gain in a World Cup year if Antonio Conte can do the trick for a real confidence playerThere was a time, going back a few years, when Everton envisaged Ross Barkley being a different kind of player to the one we see now. Ask David Moyes and he will tell you that at 15 Barkley was the closest he had ever seen to a young Norman Whiteside. Barkley could get up and down the pitch, he had the same kind of rare quality that saw Whiteside bend the ball past Neville Southall in the 1985 FA Cup final and, more than anything, he was utterly fearless in the tackle. Moyes and the youth-team coaches would...
The new £75m central defender had a comfortable bow in the FA Cup third-round win over Everton at Anfield and even managed to score the late winnerA sledgehammer to crack a nut was the expression that came to mind as Liverpool’s new £75m defender made his debut against a side with only one goal in their last four games and no shots on target in either of their last two home matches. Everton supporters were clinging to the slender hope that Jürgen Klopp might have taken a risk in throwing Virgil van Dijk straight into the heat of a Merseyside derby.There were few worries on that score, even before the centre-half scored the winning goal five minutes from the end....