The unbelievable one in 250 odds Everton beat - and why that should be ringing alarm bells for Sean Dyche

Did you know that the idea of 2-0 being the most dangerous lead in football has its own Wikipedia page? It’s not a particularly fascinating read unless you’re desperate to know which commentators are noted for using that hoary old cliché in the Balkan region, but it does at least offer up the statistic that more or less disproves the concept – only about 2% of 2-0 leads get blown in the Premier League. Which means Everton managed to beat odds of around one in 250 by doing it twice on the bounce.

The Toffees became just the second team to blow back-to-back two-goal leads, after Bournemouth when they lost to Tottenham Hotspur and Leeds United back in 2022. Perhaps the fact that the Bournemouth side in question survived relatively comfortably might offer some small comfort, but as it stands, Everton are in serious trouble. And a question is begged – if Sean Dyche can’t drill a team such that it hangs on to a two-goal lead, then exactly what is the point of Sean Dyche?

Dyche’s teams have always started slowly, so there’s an argument that these defeats are following a pattern he knows well. It’s been five years since he led a team to a win in the first month of the season, after all, and even when Burnley beat Southampton on the opening day in 2019 they followed it up with a string of defeats. If Dyche has a definite, proven flaw, it’s that he doesn’t have his teams well-prepared for the start of a new season. But then again, he gets there eventually… doesn’t he?

But while Dyche’s Burnley and Everton sides of recent years may not have been getting off to fliers, they weren’t shipping three goals a game, either. Everton only had one point to their name after five matches last season, but aside from a 4-0 thrashing at Villa Park the other defeats were all 1-0s, including against Arsenal. They couldn’t score to save their lives but they weren’t bleeding goals on a regular basis and at least some of Dyche’s trademark defensive stolidity was there.

The only season in which Dyche’s sides really let the opposition run riot was with Burnley in 2021/22, when Dyche was sacked in April and the Clarets went down. Even then, they shipped ‘just’ eight goals in their first four games – this Everton side have already had 13 put past them, more than any other team and an average of over three a game. In other words, while Dyche has a history of taking time to get the motor running, it’s only been this bad once before, and the result was relegation.

It isn’t easy to pinpoint precisely why Everton’s defence has collapsed so severely. Only Arsenal kept more clean sheets than Everton’s 13 last year, but suddenly one of the best defences in the league has become the very worst, at least across the limited sample size that we have so far.

Jarrad Branthwaite’s absence through injury is clearly a factor, and having to go back to Michael Keane in central defence has been punishing. Keane was at fault for both of Ollie Watkins’ goals yesterday, getting beaten in the air at the back post far too easily for the first and needlessly losing him when marking him one-on-one and tracking back before Jack Harrison’s failed intervention set up the second. Branthwaite, in the same positions, would surely have dealt with the first and probably would have been more switched on to the second.

The fact that Keane is still starting after struggling so far this season is an oddity in itself. Summer signing Jake O’Brien looked far stronger and more willing and able to make interventions after coming on as a substitute, but Keane still has his place despite struggling positionally and in the tackle. Pinning everything on one player would be unfair and inaccurate, but he has been especially poor.

The strange thing, when analysing Everton’s performances so far, is that there really isn’t much being done differently from last season on a team-wide basis. Normally, when a side’s form collapses, it’s possible to take a stab at diagnosing the issue on a tactical level, but Everton are setting up just the way they did last season, are allowing opposing teams to dominate the ball while setting up deep in the same manner, and so on and so forth. Which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it.

The positive reading is that Everton are still essentially the same well-organised side as they were last year but need to cut out silly individual errors and get a little luckier – after all, no team in the world wasn’t conceding from Jhon Durán’s astonishing winning goal. With this view, once Branthwaite is back and Dyche has worked a little bit of his gritty magic on some of the strugglers, things should ultimately be fine, because that’s how it typically goes when you have Dyche as your manager.

And there are at least one or two positives floating about, even if they’re rather dwarfed by another 3-2 loss. Dominic Calvert-Lewin looks much sharper up front and was getting himself into the kind of goal-scoring positions that he simply couldn’t during the worst of his long stretch in the injury wilderness. Tim Iroegbunam looks like the real deal in midfield and the way he’s started off suggests that they won’t miss Amadou Onana all that much. The trouble is that while there are straws ready for the clutching, there’s also a more negative way to read the entire situation readily available.

That viewpoints suggests that Dyche has lost his touch with the players for one reason or another and isn’t getting his gravelly messages across on a man-to-man basis, and that while his fundamental structure is still standing, the constituent parts are crumbling. This is the view that looks at Burnley’s 2021/22 season and wonders why it all went so wrong there, as well, and suggests that if a Dyche team goes too far awry for too long, he doesn’t seem to know how to turn it around. This version of events simply believes that there is a limit to his powers to avert relegation, a fate has suffered before.

We’ll know more before too long. Branthwaite is close to returning to full fitness and they wouldn’t ship 30-yard screamers every game. Across the next four games, they face two freshly-promoted sides and a welcome a struggling Crystal Palace side to Goodison Park. If they don’t have any points by the time the next international break rolls around, and if they’re still shipping three a match, then it might be time to panic.