T Bone Returns
Player Valuation: £225k
I'd say he has strong personal goals to keep it that way
I'd say he has strong personal goals to keep it that way
I'd be hoping for top half with Europe as a stretch target. Huge change needed this season. If we spend like we need to spend this summer, then mid-table won't be enough.
I didn't think it would happen, but people would have hoped for some sort of bounce.
We got a splat.
There was nothing there tonight that vindicated the decision to bring Moyes in. Sacking Dyche was necessary. Nobody will convince me rehiring Moyes was. I don't have the solution - but I hoped the owners had a bit of a plan. Seems like they didn't...
He's done great - tremendously well. I don't need "humbling". I'm not arrogant enough to think I'm always right.Well the fact you’re talking about next season’s European charge just a month after posting this:
I think that firmly points to an exceeding of expectations and a very big humbling on your part.
Graham Potter is vastly overrated. Compared to Moyes points return, they would have been better appointing Harry Potter.Can’t deny that I am enjoying the schadenfreude of Moyes taking us over West Ham. I hope we can keep ourselves up above them.
Because we had a beep manager but now we don’t.The target next year should be to improve on this year and to make sure we are nowhere near a relegation battle by new year.
I don't think we can expect too much too soon. We've been in a relegation battle at the turn of the year for 4 years in a row. Thankfully it looks like we've got out of it much earlier this year, but we were still in a lot of trouble only a month ago.
Not many managers would be able to get away with that. He has more history here and clout. More than all of them combined. He has the power. Its a 'wtf has been going on at this place while I was gone' vibe. Like a parent coming back from holiday to see his son has run amok in his gaf.1-0 up, and had a go at them at half time for not playing well enough. Standards!
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Good point. I agree.Great start from Moyes and we are winning games but for all he is getting more out of the players, the weakness of the squad is evident. We’ll need to strengthen significantly to have a realistic prospect of challenging in the Champions League.

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David Moyes' myriad of small changes has transformed Everton's season
By Alex Keble
Football
Mon February 17, 2025 · 1h ago
The disappearance of the new-manager bounce is a phenomenon that can be explained away, like most things in the Premier League, by the competition’s increasing wealth and status.
The technical and tactical quality in the division continues to grow at a ridiculous rate, and as it increases - insulating the established from the newly promoted - the psychological factors are of diminishing importance.
There is a structure to everything; so much fine-tuned detail in club-building that if the last manager couldn’t raise the bar the chances are the next one won’t be able to either, not without a summer transfer window.
From Ruben Amorim to Ruud van Nistelrooy, from Vitor Pereira to Graham Potter, new managers are finding their team is at exactly the right level for their current ability. There are no kind words or harsh ones that can lift them.
The Premier League is far too complex and intelligent for emotionality to dictate a rise or fall in the table.
Which brings us onto David Moyes, who has thrown all of that out of the window.
Everton have won 13 points from six matches under Moyes, compared to 17 points from 19 matches under Sean Dyche.
They only need four points from their next three league games to match their entire season total under Moyes’s predecessor in less than half the number of games.
It’s a credit to Moyes’s attention to detail and subtle tactical nous. But it’s an even bigger damnation of Dyche, a manager widely seen as doing a decent job by disinterested neutrals but loathed for a long time by Everton supporters forced to watch his dreary and regressive football.
Moyes has changed a lot, albeit you wouldn’t know it from listening to a mildly bemused pundit class or even if you poured through the statistics. That’s because we aren’t used to seeing one tactical philosophy replaced by a broadly similar approach, only better.
There is no wild swing easily visible to the half-watching eye or to the statistician finding patterns.
Instead, a myriad of small changes: keeping the ball on the ground for longer; taking care with possession; crossing less often; shifting the defensive line 15 yards further forward.
And, most of all, playing the best players.
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Jake O’Brien was ignored by Dyche, starting a single Premier League game this season before Moyes took one look at him and decided he could do a job at right-back.
O’Brien has since been one of Everton’s most consistent performers.
Jesper Lindstrom was in the starting lineup for only eight of Dyche’s 19 league games this season but is already on four under Moyes.
His 1.49 chances created per 90 is second only to the injured Dwight McNeil, and the same goes for his 0.61 completed crosses per 90, making Lindstrom the new creative force in the Everton team.
Beto is reborn, revelling in a team that actually creates chances from open play; that doesn’t simply exist to strangle and survive.
He didn’t start a single league game under Dyche in 2024/25, but has now started each of the last four, scoring four goals in the process.
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Along with James Garner (injured for most of the season under Dyche) and new signing Carlos Alcaraz, who scored one and assisted another on his league debut at Crystal Palace, that’s five players – or half the outfield team – who barely featured under Dyche just five weeks ago.
There aren’t normally quite so many good players hanging around the reserves. Premier League clubs tend to be far better run than that. That there suggests what we’re seeing here is the last of the dinosaurs; the extinction of that old-school clique who once came in to firefight through the spring.
That has to be the case for Everton, whose decision to cling on under Dyche was over-praised by onlookers and who, with a new stadium coming and Premier League life secured, must ensure the Dychian days are over.
Moyes has already shown the folly of trusting out-and-out defensive coaches in the modern game. Dyche was surely the last of them at Everton, and, quite possibly, the final one in Premier League history.
Graham Potter is vastly overrated. Compared to Moyes points return, they would have been better appointing Harry Potter.
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