Are Everton the thickest football team in the Premier League? This was an infuriating watch
This Everton team must be an absolutely maddening one to support.
It’s not that they’re a bad team – although they are also that – it’s that they’re a bad team that perpetually feels like it might be close to not being that, but then just proves itself once again to be exactly that.
It’s surely easier to take supporting a team that is simply sh*t. There’s an ‘ah well’ shrug-of-the-shoulders world-weariness that can be brought to supporting a team that is simply sh*t. There can be some gallows humour about it all.
But supporting a team that is sh*t but so nearly quite good is surely just very rattling indeed. Everton shouldn’t be this sh*t. Above all they shouldn’t be so very, very thick.
Their performance at Old Trafford must be among the thickest performances ever seen in the Premier League. And it came somewhere where in recent years they know a thing or two about thick performances. Heck, part of the reason Everton’s performance in this defeat stood out as so monumentally thick is because it came against a United performance that was itself very nearly as stupid. El Thicko, or something less thick. Or more thick. Whichever’s funnier.
With Casemiro as its baffling standard bearer, United spent unfathomably large periods of the first half giving the ball back to Everton in all manner of theoretically dangerous locations, absolutely none of which they had the foggiest idea how to exploit.
The near total lack of confidence Everton possess in attack is genuinely quite painful to watch. This is an attacking unit almost entirely paralysed by its own doubts and insecurities. The most accurate summary of Everton as an attacking side is that they score far less than xG says they should, but precisely as many goals as they themselves expect to score. Which is to say, hardly any.
READ MORE: Premier League xG table has Everton fifth and Manchester United 13th
But while there’s a sorrowful nature to watching Everton try to attack, it was their defensive work at Old Trafford that really marked them out as a powerfully stupid side that deserves only derision.
Now we rather like Alejandro Garnacho. He’s also quite often a bit stupid, but with him that’s all part of the fun and the charm. And fun is what he undoubtedly is. On both his best and worst days, he is a fun footballer to watch. We’ve got bags of time for that.
But what Garnacho is not, is a clinical end-product merchant. Everything else he did here today outside the two occasions when Everton players decided to brainlessly trip him up and concede the most obvious penalties in history, only confirmed this.
The best such moment came late in the first half, after the two maddeningly stupid penalty incidents, when Garnacho surged once again into the Everton penalty box and, as the realisation dawned that nobody was going to just mindlessly trip him up this time, had no answer and ended up doing precisely nothing whatsoever.
Don’t worry, though. This wasn’t Everton learning lessons or being less stupid. Even as Garnacho did nothing, there was still the sight of Jarrad Branthwaite – a properly excellent young centre-back surely destined to fulfil his promise some day at a less silly team than this – sliding uncontrollably through the penalty area for no readily apparent reason.
The penalties they did concede were the sixth and seventh Everton have given away in the Premier League this season, taking them joint top on that metric, and rendered just ever more witless by coming against a side whose struggles this lunchtime to create anything in open play should have looked so enormously familiar to the Toffees.
That Everton find themselves this season a team that can’t even say with any certainty how many Premier League points they possess due to the ever-changing and still-to-be-confirmed punishments for spending too much money on too many bad footballers (also quite stupid behaviour) is just enormously fitting.
They are currently a truly infuriating football team and also club.