Everton miss chance to make refereeing error irrelevant as new gaffe triggers Pierluigi Collina memories
Sean Dyche insists that his Everton players have “the bliss to miss” and he won’t chastise them if their efforts are off target so long as they’re in the right places to get the shots in, but the costly catalogue of profligacy against Fulham felt anything but blissful for beleaguered Blues.
At the time, Everton’s failure to convert a string of golden opportunities to score – mostly when the game was still 0-0 – felt like they were going to come back and haunt them and that duly proved the case when Marco Silva’s Cottagers, without a shot on target in the first half, sauntered through to break the deadlock with just 17 minutes remaining.
Despite first working in English football some six-and-a-half years ago, Silva – in charge of the Blues for 18 months between 2018-19 – still had to have it explained to him in the post-match press conference was the phrase “smash and grab win” meant but while the Portuguese manager might have struggled with the terminology, this was a textbook example.
Watching back Everton’s wretched finishing didn’t get any easier second time round either and if anything, television replays just reinforced how bad their misses were. Whether it was Neal Maupay – a striker now with one goal in his last 40 competitive matches (a run stretching back to his latter months at Brighton & Hove Albion) – failing to beat Bernd Leno from point blank range; Abdoulaye Doucoure having a shot saved by the German’s leg when one-on-one; Nathan Patterson smashing an enticing opportunity from a rebound against the crossbar or Alex Iwobi being denied just before that plus on a couple more occasions, in truth they were the kind of chances that at Premier League level you simply have to be converting.
Dyche admitted as much
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