Everton claims Sean Dyche has lost the dressing room are missing the point

Everton’s humiliating 6-0 thrashing to Chelsea was painful enough but beleaguered Blues must hope that manager Sean Dyche hasn’t lost something even more damaging – the dressing room.

Like that age old question about “how big a club is?” (do you measure trophies/when they were won/number of fans etc), the concept of having possession of the dressing room is one of football’s great intangibles but an inability to quantify or prove it doesn’t make it any less of a reality. Relinquishing such control can be a serious matter for any manager and the kind of blow it is difficult to recover from.

Romelu Lukaku claimed Roberto Martinez lost the Everton dressing room before he was sacked for what in these current leanest of times seems like the dizzying heights of finishing 11th. Some two decades ago, similar things were being said about David Moyes but he went on to make a mockery of such suggestions and enjoy his best days at the club.

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Having got themselves safe with a 3-1 victory over Tottenham Hotspur on Good Friday 2004, the Blues failed to win any of their last six matches, culminating with a 5-1 drubbing at Manchester City on the final day of the season that condemned them to 17th place with just 39 points – a number that at the time was the club’s lowest equivalent total although it was subsequently matched in 2021/22 and lowered further in 2022/23 when Everton avoided their first relegation in 72 years by a single goal. Following their shellacking at the hands of Kevin Keegan’s pre-oil money Citizens (Sheikh Mansour’s gargantuan chequebook wouldn’t arrive for another