You dont think leaving out the undisputed #1 GK, breaking up the CB partnership and leaving out your most attack minded player was a disruption? Making use of the likes of Gueye/Junior for Osman/Pienaar, fine. Put them in and see how it goes. Something you can put right by having Osman/Pienaar on the bench.
I don't blame
Moyes for anything that happened prior to the 2nd goal.
The thing is, if you have a squad of players, all of whom are competing for a starting place, not only should they be capable of coming in and holding their own when called upon, but they should also make every effort to impress when the opportunity arises. Additionally, the fact they are getting less opportunities in the 1st place, for whatever reason that may be, fitness, form, or maybe even just the form of others ahead of them, means that these players need game time, because they are not getting it elsewhere.
On Tuesday, everyone, apart from Silva and Oviedo, has started at least 1 1st team game this season alone. They where all 1st team players. Everyone apart Silva had previous 1st team experience, given Oviedo made an appearance against Swansea, even if it was only brief.
For those reasons alone,
Moyes was right to select those players, and well within his right to believe they could out perform a Championship side.
But things aren't always that straight forward, and hindsight is a wonderful thing.
See, we could have started that game with fewer changes from the team that played so well against Swansea. 1 change that I'm sure virtually everyone would have made though is that of Naismith coming in, given he is clearly in and around the 1st team, but hasn't started as many since Mirrallas arrived. And it was Naismith's sloppy pass in a dangerous area that led directly to the goal. It was not Silva's fault at all. If Neville had played instead of Silva, who's to say it wouldn't have happened in the exact same way?
And there was nothing that having Howard in goal would have changed either.
What I do blame Moyes for is the ridiculous tactic of dragging everyone back for Corners and Freekicks... and in the case of the 2nd goal, to not even cover someone standing on the edge of the box?
Ridiculous. It just invites pressure upon pressure, and cause the box to be crowded too, which leads to the all too frequent deflected goals that we concede.
The other thing that bothered me was the snide remarks about Silva's performance.
There where 2 changes at half time. 1 of them needed to be made, and 1 of them made a difference. Pienaar for the totally ineffective and anonymous Gueye was important for multiple reasons. 1st, it gave us more creativity and someone to build play through. 2nd, it allowed Mirrallas to move out wide where he was (slightly) more effective and 3rd, it allowed Fellaini to move further forward, because in the centre he had been poor, and didn't support Silva, especially as a youngster and a debutant, which made Silva’s task much harder than it needed to be.
But in taking him off at half time, Silva wasn't allowed to try and put it right, try and impose himself more in the 2nd half. And then to follow that with the jibes about "some of the debutants did OK, some them didn't", is just outrageous. How is that supposed to help him?
At the end of the day though, the team that started SHOULD have been good enough to beat Leeds. But we where poor on the day, we had an off day, and Leeds took full advantage. It could have happened with our regular 1st 11, as has often been the case in the past with Everton.
Everyone has an off day from time to time, and usually with Everton, it's at the most unexpected or inconvenient of times.
Let's just hope this was ours, and that's all it was. Like West Brom.
