Everton the ‘England’ of clubs

While everyone is still digesting that disgraceful Everton performance in Sunday’s FA cup derby at Anfield, I keep having an increasing sense that the Toffees are becoming more and more like the England national team.

The reason why I make the comparison between Everton and the England team, is that I feel there are a lot of ways in which the Toffees seem to be increasingly mirroring the Three Lions.

It seems that whatever kind of changes the Blues make, whoever they bring in, be it owners, players or coaches, the club always seems to struggle to achieve success these days.

Yes I know it’s still very early days in the latest Toffees makeover under Carlo Ancelotti, and perhaps the Italian can turn things around. However Sunday night’s defeat reawakened all the fears I have that no matter what the club does, things will always go wrong!

If Ancelotti can’t find adequate replacements very soon for some of those ‘players’ who so badly let down loyal Evertonians in Sunday’s game, then the team are in trouble again.

Any repeat performances of that kind in the next few weeks, and the Blues will be very quickly back in a relegation fight.

After the initial impetus of the post-Silva period when Duncan Ferguson took temporary charge, the players seem to have slipped back into the kind of lethargic, mentally fragile efforts that so undermined this season.

That sort of mental torpor has also often seemed to characterise England teams down the years, with the burden of expectation and history weighing heavily on the players.

Perhaps the hardest thing for Ancelotti to do will be moving on so many who are not performing. That so-called ‘dead wood’ has now grown into a veritable forest of underachieving footballers.

As well as the likes of Cenk Tosun, Cuco Martina and Omaar Niasse, can now be added names such as Micheal Keane, Glyfi Sigurdsson, Morgan Schniederlin and Theo Walcott. Maybe you could also include Jordan Pickford whose form is increasingly erratic and costly. Another who seems to have lost interest is Lucas Digne, a shadow of the player we saw last season.

Finding a way to offload so many players is going to be a huge task for the Italian, while he is also trying to add better quality replacements at the same time.

And selling that number of players will not only take several windows, but will mean the Blues taking a big loss in transfer fees. After all who is going to pay £45 million for Sigurdsson?

All this gives me a feeling that it’s going to take a very long time before the Blues can compete with the teams they are aiming at. The gulf between Everton and our neighbours hasn’t been this great since those dark, dark days of the early eighties.

I’m not sure that Ancelotti had any idea just how much work he had ahead of him, when he agreed to become the manager! If he can bring success back to Goodison Park it will surely be his greatest managerial achievement. It feels as though it is becoming as difficult to manage the Blues in club football, as it is to bring success back to our national side.

There is an expectation that still surrounds Everton (like England), and much of it is probably undeserved given it’s so long in both cases since they really achieved anything substantial.

That does though mean a level of pressure at Goodison Park that a club such as Leicester City for example don’t have. Like England, the Blues rich history and traditions makes failure and underachievement harder to take and quickens expectation on managers to find a wining formula.

Both Everton and England have also often been badly run from top to bottom with over-hyped and under-achieving players and managers failing to deliver.

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For the Toffees, after a hugely successful 1980’s came a dreadfully underachieving 1990’s with a solitary FA cup win in ’95. Then there was a period of time under David Moyes when it seemed the club might have turned a corner again.

But despite a Champions League appearance in 2005, regular European football and reaching the FA cup final in 2009, it ultimately proved to be another unsuccessful era without silverware.

Now the Blues are once more back in the pack of struggling and unsuccessful clubs trying desperately to find a way to revive past glories.

We have to hope that finally Everton have got it right with Ancelotti’s appointment and that he won’t turn out to be the club’s version of Fabio Capello. He was another hugely experienced and trophy-winning Italian coach who was brought in to manage England on a massive contract but couldn’t bring success despite having a ‘golden generation’ of players.