Lampard has learned from his past mistakes and is slowly transforming Everton with Cole
Everton have been revived so far this season, so is it possible that Frank Lampard will defy the dire predictions that were made for his team?
When Everton and Manchester United last played each other at Goodison Park in April, the home side were in deep trouble at the bottom of the Premier League. With just 25 points from 29 games, they were only a point above the relegation places. Concerns were building about their financial viability following the departure of their main sponsor Alisher Usmanov following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Three days earlier, they lost what was considered a potentially season-defining match at Burnley.
Seven months on, the picture at Goodison Park looks considerably rosier. Everton survived relegation, though it took until the penultimate game of the season for them to do so. A 1-0 win that day against a predictably disjointed, late-stage Ralf Rangnick Manchester United team proved to be the catalyst for the revival. They took 14 points from their last nine matches and finished 16th – an improvement which has continued over the course of the summer and now into the autumn.
Everton will take on Manchester United this time off the back of a six-game unbeaten run – their longest in the league since December 2017 – and with the atmosphere surrounding the club having been transformed.
It hasn’t necessarily always been exciting. Everton’s eight Premier League matches so far this season have only featured 14 goals, more than only managerless Wolves. But if last season’s flirtation with a first relegation in 70 years was ‘exciting’, Everton supporters will be happy enough to sit out that particular emotional rollercoaster again.
And all of this makes it time for a bit of a reappraisal for manager Frank Lampard. He had previously been characterised as football’s ultimate case of falling upwards. Failure to get promotion with Derby County didn’t prevent him from getting the Chelsea job. Getting sacked by Chelsea didn’t prevent him from getting appointed by Everton. And Everton’s struggles last season was treated as vindication for the already well-established viewpoint that he was getting these posts on the basis of his name alone.
This revival has come about in a somewhat unexpected manner. Lampard’s Chelsea team had a reputation for having a bit of a leaky defence; the suspicion was that the former attacking midfielder was struggling to set one up that functioned properly. That certainly doesn’t seem to be the case any more. Everton have only conceded seven goals in their first eight games and have only conceded more than one in a match all season, with that coming in the middle of August.
At the heart of that revival is a retuned defence. The arrivals of James Tarkowski from Burnley and Conor Coady from Wolves have added stability and experience, and for a financial outlay that seems almost miraculous by the standards of the modern Premier League. Tarkowski arrived at the club on a free transfer and Coady on loan from Wolves, with it having been reported that they will only have to pay £4.5m to make his signature permanent.
That is a piece of business so good it can only reasonably described as most un-Everton, considering the way in which the club has chucked money around in recent years.
But it’s also worth making mention of one member of the coaching staff whose arrival at the club has coincided with this better defensive organisation. When Ashley Cole was brought in at the start of February there was more scoffing about ‘jobs for the boys’, but if Cole’s remit was to tighten that Everton defence, there can be little question that he has succeeded. On top of Tarkowski and Coady offering greater stability in the middle, full-backs Nathan Patterson and Vitalii Mykolenko are also considerably improved, while goalkeeper Jordan Pickford has been in excellent club form for at least a year.
The midfield also seem to have dropped many of their worst habits from last season. Idrissa Gueye’s return to Goodison Park has acted like a steel rod between their defence and midfield. Alex Iwobi has been transformed in the middle, which is all the more extraordinary considering that he had become something of a punch-bag during leaner times, the physical manifestation of the club’s previous financial profligacy. Anthony Gordon has similarly been effective in both attacking and defensive positions.
This improvement has also improved the prognosis for the club’s future. Everton’s move to Bramley-Moore Dock had come to look like something of a poisoned chalice, but with fortunes having turned around on the pitch there is now interest from several American investment groups who may be keen to buy into a club with such a grand history. Thus far, owner Farhad Moshiri has denied that the club is for sale, but financial investment into the new stadium project would ease the financial restrictions that have been necessary following years of wasteful spending.
But just as for everybody else, the month of October could be season-defining for Everton. Their next three fixtures against Manchester United, Spurs and Newcastle offer bigger tests than they’ve faced so far this season, but after this they have a further four matches before the mid-winter break against Crystal Palace, Fulham, Leicester and Bournemouth, from which they will be expecting to take enough to prove that this hasn’t just been a flash in the pan.
Eight games isn’t much, and there’s plenty of ways in which Everton’s season could yet turn sour. Those next three games, for example, could make any talk of revival this season seem somewhat premature. But Lampard and Cole seem to be onto something at Goodison Park, and building the team around a strong and cohesive defence has thus far proved a successful way of putting the agonies of last season behind them.
It may well be that Lampard didn’t have the chops for the elite end of the game when he was at Chelsea, but it also seems that he has learned from his earlier mistakes and is building a team shorn of the insecurities that had been blighting their performances. It’s early days yet, but Goodison Park seems a much happier place to be than it was for much of last season.
