But......serious question here......how important is defending?
What I mean is a club like Everton with its resources will not get relegated. We just won't. If we have a half decent manager we get the "best of the rest" title. So unless there's a clear plan to break into the Sky 6 elite then if we don't play champagne attacking football - what really is the point?
I want to try and win cups and play great footy. I can take the heroic defeat all day long if we've given it a go. I'm just really not bothered whether we finish 7th or 14th to be honest.
We were being absolutely hammered by everybody we played because we had forgotten how to defend. Now we have remembered how, we are not getting hammered. Had we not remembered how, The RS and Chelsea would have put ten past us, West Brom would have beaten us. I think it is niave to think we cannot ever be relegated. On another point, I saw very few ‘heroic defeats’ in the run up to Allardyce being appointed. I saw the kind of gutless, can’t be arsed displays that are common amongst relegated clubs?
Every great Everton team I have ever watched could defend. the trophy winning Liverpool, Manchester United and Chelsea teams could play champagne football only because they could defend when they lost the ball. In fact I have never seen a successful English team that didn’t have a strong defensive base? I am not happy with the football we are playing, but we are in an awful state and need to be settled, restructured, then restarted again. Throwing defensive basics out of the window is not the safest of tactics as Martinez demonstrated?
Moyes, once our defence was structured properly, had us playing some nice football, and the team had the confidence to go forward knowing that we wouldn’t be hit on the break as the had a solid defence behind them. That is what we need to aim for again (minus the inferiority complex).