Everton need new keeper
As we continue to see stories emerging about new players Everton may be interested in, one area of the team that is concerning is the form of goalkeeper Jordan Pickford. So do the Blues need to sign a new stopper this summer?
Current goalkeeping incumbent Jordan Pickford has come under increasing scrutiny this season after several poor and erratic performances for Everton.
In particular games against Liverpool away and Newcastle United at home, (both teams he repeatedly seems to struggle and fail against), have led to criticism of the England man’s mentality and levels of concentration.
Pickford’s individual issues highlight one of the biggest problems that the side have at the moment; the constant propensity to make unforced individual errors that so often lead to unnecessary goals being conceded.
To be fair to him, Pickford hasn’t had a very stable or reliable defence in front of him and he still makes some superb, instinctive, reflex saves that often earn Everton points.
The team’s backline has changed quite often over the past two seasons, with a number of combinations being tried by previous manager Marco Silva as he searched for consistency.
This is never the best environment for a still young goalkeeper to learn and improve his craft. Hopefully, under Carlo Ancelotti that situation will improve.
However there does seem to be a recurrent pattern of problems, which raise questions abut whether the England international is the long-term solution for the Toffees.
One of those issues is his height. Pickford isn’t the tallest of goalkeepers and that occasionally leads to opponents scoring goals past him that a taller keeper with greater reach, might get to. The Liverpool winner in the FA Cup defeat at Anfield is a case in point.
It’s difficult to say for certain whether Pickford is too small for the modern game, he is well over six-foot tall and a fine athlete and sometimes you will get beaten by a screamer – that’s football.
The more worrying issue is his apparently fragile mental state and propensity to lose concentration and be affected by the crowd and environment.
This was perhaps first highlighted last season when the Blues excruciatingly lost in the last seconds at Anfield as Pickford inextricably came for hopeful high ball, which he then lost giving Divock Origi the chance to score the winner.
Then later in the season the Toffees lost 3-2 at Newcastle United having led by two goals with half an hour to go.
In this game, he seemed to get distracted getting into altercations with the Geordie crowd as an ex-Sunderland man, and one of the Magpies goals then came from the kind of brain freeze moment that seem to grip Pickford from time to time.
While Pickford has many qualities, not least his shot-stopping and distribution, (although even that has declined), keepers just can’t afford to keep making these sorts of errors. In that position you are so exposed and even the slightest misjudgement can lead to a goal.
So while you will always make mistakes, it’s perhaps the most important area of his game that a goalkeeper limits such errors to a minimum.
The England player also seems to lack the ability to impose himself on his players and dominate his penalty area sufficiently.
Given all this, it was a bit surprising to me that the Blues let summer signing Jonas Lossl return to Huddersfield on loan in January although they recalled Joao Virginia from his stint at Reading. Virginia though is very inexperienced and Lossl would have been the obvious alternative.
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Anyway, there are rumours emerging today that Everton might be looking at recruiting another keeper to create some more competition for the Number One jersey. That player is Turkish stopper Urgucan Cakir.
The Trabzonspor keeper has been in excellent form and, according to Sportwitness, has attracted interest from a number of big European clubs.
Cakir is a bit taller than Pickford and has a strong all-round game being good in all the key areas of a goalkeepers skill set.
If the fee was reasonable, I think it would be no bad idea to bring in a young goalie who could straight away compete with him, especially as both Lossl and the other senior keeper Marten Stekelenberg are both over 30. Perhaps this would force Pickford to raise his game and eradicate these errors of judgement.