More derby day blues for Everton?

Another derby day approaches as Everton take their shortest away journey of the season across Stanley Park to take on the old enemy at Anfield on Wednesday.

This match has probably become Evertonians least favourite fixture of the season. There is an oft-repeated adage that ‘form doesn’t matter in a derby’. However recent games have been almost uniformly awful and there haven’t been many recent derby games where Everton go into the match as such massive underdogs.

The Blues are coming into the game on the back of two consecutive deflating defeats while Liverpool have still not been defeated this season and keep on winning, week in week out.

Sunday’s loss at Leicester City was in many respects even more demoralising than the home defeat to Norwich the previous weekend.

The Toffees made a decent fist of the game, certainly for the whole of the first half and they were worth their slender lead at the break.

But as is almost inevitable, the Blues couldn’t add a crucial second goal or protect what they had. Even if they had left the Midlands with a point it would still have been regarded as a good one. Once Leicester had equalised they always looked the more likely to nick it.

This Toffees team has a very fragile psychological state that is exposed again and again, whenever the team need to knuckle down and grind a result out.

The number of times the Blues have conceded goals right at the death is also a big worry. Premier League games now often seem to run for 97 or 98 minutes and you have to maintain concentration and effort all the way through.

Turning attention to Wednesday and there is very little to give Evertonians hope of finally ending an Anfield hoodoo that now stretches to twenty years. It’s that long since we won there, I remember watching that 1-0 win in 1999 in a pub in Liverpool, and never imagined Everton still wouldn’t have won at that ground again.

Looking for hopeful things to hang onto, the Reds have made a habit of conceding sloppy goals this season, although of course their usual good luck has often come to the rescue.

One other small crumb of comfort is that Liverpool are missing Fabinho, who has become a lynchpin in their midfield. He’ s not one of their glamour performers like Mo Salah, but his role is integral to how they play, much as fellow Brazilian Fernadinho is for Manchester City.

Still the kopites will be a formidable opponent with the quality they have and the confidence they possess at the moment.

Apart from the usual suspects, one player the Blues do need to watch closely and try to nullify is Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. The Ox has been re-rejuvenated at Liverpool and is approaching the kind of form that once had him being regarded as one of England’s most important players.

He is giving Liverpool something they haven’t had since Philippe Coutinho left for Barcelona, a player who can regularly score goals from midfield.

As for Everton, Marco Silva tried a back three last weekend and to give him his due, although I don’t generally like that formation it worked quite well against Leicester, at least for a while. So it might be worth sticking to it and replicating the Leicester approach on Wednesday night.

In midfield I hope that Fabian Delph is fit as he was missed in the Leicester game. Tom Davies is not a holding, defensive player and his game suffered from doing that. Delph’s experience and leadership will be important if he is able to play on Wednesday.

Alongside him once more I would hope to see Davies and Alex Iwobi. It was irritating to see Iwobi substituted on Sunday, I really don’t understand the thinking behind that.

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Hopefully Bernard is fit to be considered for a start up front, and although he wasn’t brilliant at Leicester City, there might be a case to be made for continuing to play Dominic Calvert-Lewin, although I would be tempted to give Moise Kean a start.

It’s likely the Blues will not have the majority of the ball and will have to play on the break quite a lot so Calvert-Lewin might be the better option to hold the ball up and give others the chance to join him.

So is there any chance the Blues can overcome the tide of recent history and come up with something special on Wednesday night?  I doubt it and although it pains me to say it we might be looking at a heavy defeat if things go badly.

Alternatively Everton do have this infuriating habit of producing better performances when they are playing good teams, even if they don’t often win the game. So frankly who knows?