Willian was a particular threat during the first 45 minutes and Michael Keane almost gifted him an equaliser with 18 minutes gone with a horrible touch on the edge of his own box and Tammy Abraham came very close to touching him one of the Brazilian’s centres from the right. Indeed, it was to the credit of Frank Lampard’s side that they didn’t wilt in the face of Everton’s ferocious start and early strike through Richarlison.Īt times in the first half they danced around the close attention, snapping tackles and full-blooded lunges from Blue jerseys, manfully trying to play their way through the maelstrom and with a bit more fortune, they might have ruined Ferguson’s day. To a man, Everton scrapped, harried, chased and bull-dozed their way through a blistering first half in which they took an early lead and then held Chelsea at bay, ceding as much as 80% of the ball to the visitors and yet still managing to carve out a great chance to go into the interval with a bigger advantage.Īnd when the pace of their efforts inevitably dropped in the second half, they retained their shape, their concentration and work ethic to eventually stifle a Chelsea team that came to Goodison with one of the best away records in the division. The team sheet, featuring the much-maligned Gylfi Sigurdsson and Morgan Schneiderlin, Theo Walcott and Dominic Calvert-Lewin, a player who hadn’t scored since October, might not have been greeted with much enthusiasm but the trust instilled in them by Ferguson was returned ten-fold. There may have been 23 more games to go in the Premier League season before kick-off today and, as the big man himself acknowledged to the press yesterday, plenty of time for this team to drag itself out of the bottom three but Duncan Ferguson will have been acutely aware of the low ebb that Everton found themselves after three successive defeats.Įverton badly needed a result today one point would have done in the circumstances but three would have been priceless and cometh the hour, cometh the Talisman, wearing Howard Kendall's watch it would later be revealed, to inspire from a hitherto listless and directionless team a performance of high intensity, desire and determination that was matched by a raucous and then rapturous Goodison Park.
But this past week, after humiliation in the Merseyside derby, the dismissal of Marco Silva and with a daunting run of fixtures in the run-up to Christmas, there was a deep sense of foreboding at Everton.
Maybe a few weeks or months down the road Evertonians will look back on the start of December 2019 and wonder, as they did two years ago when the club lifted itself clear of relegation danger during the transition from David Unsworth and Sam Allardyce, what all the panic was about.
Everton end awful season in typically dour fashion.Leighton Baines: A new generation now has an Everton Legend story to tell.
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