The long absence of the leader of their defence leaves Jürgen Klopp’s side looking fragile for the first time in three yearsThis was already shaping up to be a very different title race to those of the last three years and the news that Virgil van Dijk will be out for several months only makes the picture more uncertain. He, above all others, is the player Liverpool could not afford to lose. Jordan Pickford’s wild lunge at him could become the defining image of the season – and the failure to send the Everton goalkeeper off the most mystifying failure of VAR.The start to this campaign has been generally chaotic. None of the expected title contenders has looked quite ready,...
The goalkeeper should have been sent off early on in the Merseyside derby against Liverpool, went on to make some outstanding saves before getting away with a late blunderPerhaps the most remarkable aspect of Everton’s start to the season is not that they are top of the league, but that they are top of the league with Jordan Pickford in the sort of mood he’s been in for the past 18 months. He is a wrecking ball of pure energy, always up for it, a player apparently determined never to regret what he didn’t do. His performance against Liverpool was a characteristic maelstrom of reflex brilliance and damaging misjudgment: he nearly cost his team the game, yet he also made...
Liverpool and Manchester United have infuriated the Premier League clubs who were in the dark but the premise of their proposal is soundThere are so many extraordinary elements in the Liverpool and Manchester United proposals to reshape English football, and so much understandable scepticism, that the historic move at the heart of it is in danger of being missed.So, for clarity, it really is true that the US owners of these two fabulously rich football corporations have produced an offer that has not been forthcoming and never seemed possible from any Premier League leadership figures for 28 years. Related: Premier League's pay-per-view TV deal under fire from furious football fans Related: Arsène Wenger: ‘I try to read everything that helps...
Picking a lineup is useful less for who makes the cut than for what the process says about the current state of the gameThe Fifa world rankings rarely fail to raise an eyebrow. Óscar Washington Tabárez is one of the world’s great coaches but are Uruguay, who scraped a 2-1 win over Chile on Thursday, really the sixth-best side in the world right now? Nobody who saw England’s notional first-choice centre-back pairing of Harry Maguire and Joe Gomez in separate action for their clubs last Sunday would feel comfortable with their ranking of fourth. Germany 14th: when do we start talking seriously about Jogi Löw? And Belgium, whom England face on Sunday, top? Even after 12 straight wins before Thursday’s...
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...