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With three games in four days, Easter often used to define many an English football season but while those hectic hat-tricks of fixtures played in yesteryear have gone, the coming week or so could still prove to be a pivotal time for Everton.

For decades, the Good Friday, Easter Saturday, Easter Monday triple bill was a staple of the top flight calendar, along with other divisions up and down the country. Given that the football season would typically finish earlier then as well, these intense periods late in the campaign often settled title and relegation issues.

Everton’s last Easter treble was in 1978 and they went out with a bang, winning as many matches in the space of 72 hours as they recorded at Goodison Park during the current season. A 2-0 success at Newcastle United on Good Friday (March 24) was followed by a 2-0 victory over Leeds United at Goodison Park the next day and then a 2-1 triumph against Manchester United at Old Trafford on Easter Monday.

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Apart from Dave Thomas taking the number 11 shirt off George Telfer following the trip to St James’ Park, manager Gordon Lee picked the same other 10 starters for all three games too. That’s the kind of continuity that current Blues boss Sean Dyche, a man who doesn’t like the disruption of an unnecessary substitution, would surely approve of.

Such gruelling endurance tests no longer exist on the fixture list but Everton and Dyche – whose nine-and-half-year reign at Burnley ended on Good Friday in 2022 – will be desperate to avoid the ignominy of going between Christmas and