Well the news keeps on getting better by the day. After derby success at Anfield, approval for the new stadium plans by Liverpool city council and Lucas Digne signing his new contract, Carlo Ancelotti has been saying that he wants to stay at Everton past his current deal.
The Everton boss was talking about how much he is enjoying managing the Toffees and life in general on Merseyside and hinted that he wouldn’t mind still being in the hotseat when the Blues finally move into their new ground – assuming everything goes to plan – in 2024.
Ever since he first walked through the door at Goodison Park on that sunny Saturday in December 2019, Ancelotti has seemed very comfortable and appeared to have settled in pretty much immediately.
Gradually the Italian has begun to stamp his imprint on this Blues team. He’s brought in players like Allan, James Rodriguez and Ben Godfrey who have hugely improved the quality of the squad and he’s also had a positive impact on existing players who weren’t performing like Alex Iwobi and Tom Davies.
Results have been on an upward curve, although there are still too many poor performances against teams Everton should be beating more often than not.
This problem seems to be his biggest challenge. Ancelotti has seemingly cured the Toffees away-day blues, (although we’ll have to see if that continues once fans return in numbers), and Everton are producing much stronger efforts against the better teams, highlighted by Saturday’s derby win.
Now he has to ensure they can perform consistently and put away inferior opponents routinely, as all the best and most successful sides do.
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I have been critical of his constant chopping and changing of players at times as I don’t think it’s helped with consistency, but obviously Ancelotti has huge experience and footballling nous so I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.
Perhaps he’s been finding that he needs to do more motivation or shaking things up than he was used to with pervious teams he managed like Chelsea or Real Madrid.
Those teams often appeared to operate on auto-pilot and had senior players who could be relied upon to drive the rest on and win those sort of run-of-the-mill matches. He doesn’t seem to have enough of those individuals yet at Everton.
At any rate Ancelotti has talked before of evolution in the team and it’s results and so we will have to try and be a little patient as he continues to build the team he wants.
But if things continue as they have done and the 61-year-old is able to bring those long-overdue glory days back to Goodison Park, then I’m sure he would be a shoo-in if he wanted to stay on longer and take the Toffees into their new home at the Bramley Moore dock.