Danny Murphy is spot on – Everton have ‘lost themselves’ over the summer

If you cast your mind back to last season, you might recall an Everton side that overcame two points deductions, minimal investment in the first-team squad and a chaotic ownership situation to comfortably evade relegation. They were rugged, disciplined and hard to break down. Only Arsenal kept more clean sheets. They certainly weren’t breaking records for blowing leads harder than any team has blown them before.

In losing 3-2 to Bournemouth on Saturday, Everton set a record for the latest a Premier League side has been up by two goals in a game only to lose. Inside ten minutes, 87 minutes of hard graft and, at times, genuinely decent football was thrown away to leave the Toffees winless, pointless and rock bottom of the early table. It was just about everything that a Sean Dyche side isn’t meant to do.

Accordingly, the pundits have the knives out and sharpened to a fine point. Among them was Danny Murphy, the BBC’s gloomiest pundit in the post-Lawrenson era, and he took the Toffees to task on Sports Report.

“You lose belief and start doubting what you're doing and doubting each other - but it's also a lack of leadership,” he said. “It's a shock to me because they've got experienced players on the pitch, Michael Keane, James Tarkowski, Seamus Coleman. You have to get close to each other, be organised, narrow up and be hard to beat… They showed that last season when they got out of trouble. Against Bournemouth they were in disarray and completely lost themselves.”

Which is a relatively neat summation of the difference between the 2023/24 Everton and the Everton that have seen so far this season, which looked half-beaten ten minutes into their first two matches and feel half-relegated before the campaign has really gotten started.

Some of the specifics of Murphy’s analysis don’t necessarily seem to line up with the reality, admittedly. All three of the late goals they conceded came not because they weren’t compact enough but because, perhaps, they were too compact – three crosses, three late runs not tracked, three goals scored either in front of the defence or at the far post with far too much space and far too little pressure applied.

But the fundamental point stands that the grit which typified the team last year appears to have vanished, and that seems more damaging than any tactical errors that were made. Psychologically, they collapsed in an even less edifying fashion against Tottenham Hotspur the weekend prior, when they took a 4-0 pasting and seemed completely unable to cobble anything together once they had gone behind. There is no evidence of fight or of the capacity to mount their own comebacks when things go sour.

Meanwhile, all of the problems from last season remain. Farhad Moshiri has still not sold the club and the situation grows more worrisome the longer the latest set of negotiations drag out for. A couple of deadline day loans will help with squad depth, but they have still spent less than they have earned on transfers and spent considerably less than any of the three newly-promoted sides. There hasn’t been a points deduction yet, at least, but then we haven’t seen the latest financial calculations.

In other words, good news is thin on the ground and the sense of creeping dread felt between the incongruous Goodison Park pillars is understandable. This is a poor Premier League team that was held together by sheer gumption last season, and if that’s gone, then what do they have left to work with?

There is one good omen for Evertonians, at least. For all his undoubted qualities as a head coach, Dyche has always been a slow starter – indeed, he hasn’t won a match in the first month of a new season for five years, since his Burnley side beat Southampton on the opening day in 2019, and that team didn’t win any of their next four. And Everton lost their first three games last year, too, and didn’t even score a goal.

Perhaps it’s just a case of it taking time for his methods and ideas to bed back in, even when players have worked with him before and know the system. Maybe it’s because Dyche can only really succeed as a manager when he can instigate a siege mentality within the squad, and to do that they need to be besieged in the first place. If it’s the latter, then Dyche should be thrilled with the current situation because the enemy are at the gates and supplies haven’t gotten through the barricades for months.

Whatever the underlying cause, the only certainty is that it can’t go on like this for much longer. Outside of the newly promoted sides, it isn’t immediately easy to see a clear-cut relegation candidate, with the other plausible also-rans on paper such as Brentford and Nottingham Forest starting reasonably well. Everton going down, something they have been immune to despite their own best efforts over the years, does not seem so very unlikely.

If the ownership situation isn’t resolved satisfactorily and soon, then trifling matters like points totals and league positions may be the least of the club’s concerns, but Dyche and his motley crew of proven, hardened survivors have to carry on as if that will be sorted out for now – the problem being that they aren’t. So far, they have been uncharacteristically flaky, flat and easy to brush aside. Next up, Aston Villa away…