It's still early days but I'm disappointed overall. Having thought we bought well in the summer, I expected a little more.
Silva himself says it's all about results and he is correct.
I wanted us to be good enough to firmly establish ourselves in 7th and use that as a platform to try to further cut the points gap between ourselves and the 5th and 6th place sides in his second season. And be generally competitive both home and away against the top six, win once on the road and maybe twice at GP.
We simply are not consistent enough in terms of results and performances, typified perfectly by the last two games. Yesterday was an ideal opportunity to push on and win the game, and we turned in a showing that was quite disgraceful. Where does that come from when we have players who are individually capable of much better? Successive away wins and hitting 30 points would have signified at least something.
Home form far too patchy, and the players still look as if they have no right to compete, let alone win, away. Yesterday just looked as if nobody could be bothered enough. That's unacceptable. I don't accept excuses about tiredness, we had an early cup exit and no European games.
That's the biggest issue for me - still no fight and heart in the team leading to lapses in concentration and an inability to get out of the blocks and start games on the right foot. They looked as if it didn't matter yesterday. So I must think Silva is struggling to motivate the players or conversely, isn't showing his temper often enough. But we are told it is a happy dressing room and club. I wonder what the Barcelona contingent make of Everton a few months on. Where are the leaders in the group?
We are firmly entrenched amongst the also-rans, a group of clubs like Wolves, Watford, West Ham, Bournemouth, Leicester, that we have historically turned up our noses at. We are no better than any of them collectively. All recently promoted sides give or take a few years, and yo-yo clubs. Even Brighton, who will be attuned to looking over their shoulders between now and May, are merely two points behind us. Not being condescending but I didn't recognise half of their team yesterday. I just didn't know the individuals. That didn't and doesn't make us better than them, obviously not, but I still think we had the better players out there yesterday. We didn't want it enough, it didn't matter enough and that's the theme of Everton these days.
I couldn't be bothered to hear Silva's comments yesterday but I'm sure they were full of the usual platitudes. Perhaps its asking for too much for an Everton manager just to say "Sorry, that simply wasn't good enough".
