Here we are again with Everton needing another win to keep their fragile and increasingly unrealistic hopes of Europe next season alive.
It’s an excercise in rinse and repeat as Everton once again face a match that they simply must win for the seemingly umpteenth time in this last few weeks.
The Toffees travel to the London Stadium to face a West Ham United side that have confounded expectations of another relegation battle and are still mathematically anyway, in the hunt for the Champions League.
This is what we should have been saying about the Blues at this stage of the season but instead after a really poor run of recent results Everton now only have a slim chance of Europe at all never mind the top competition.
There are two immediate reasons to summon up a wary sort of optimism, or try to, about the chances of the Blues team.
One obviously is it’s away from Goodison Park. The Toffees have been dreadful at home nearly all campaign and have dropped a ridiculous number of points at the grand old lady.
In contrast this Jekle and Hyde team has managed ten wins on the road, a total not seen since the days of Howard Kendall, Neville Southall, Peter Reid and Graeme Sharp, when Everton last were league champions.
The other reason for hope is that West Ham are a team the Blues love to play. Their record against the Hammers is excellent overall in the Premier League era.
One fundamental question of course is what team will Carlo Ancelotti pick?
Recently he’s made some questionable team selection decisions and last weekend got it wrong against Aston Villa in picking Mason Holgate and Ben Godfrey at centre-back together.
The basis for this it seemed was a desire for continuity and that has it’s merits as one of the problems the Toffees have had this season is so much chopping and changing from game to game.
This in part is simply the consequence of so many injury problems but also sometimes its the manager’s own decisions.
It didn’t work on Saturday as Holgate in particular had an absolute nightmare of a match making a Sunday league error in the first half that allowed Ollie Watkins to score Villa’s opener and generally having a terrible game.
I think he should have reverted to the back three now that both Yerry Mina and Michael Keane are back fit, as that has worked well recently and Holgate and Godfrey look much more comfortable in that formation.
On injuries the good news is Abdoulaye Doucoure is fit again and will be in contention to start at West Ham. This is an important bit of news with Doucoure is such a fundamentally crucial part of the Everton midfield and team.
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The other big question is whether James Rodriguez is going to be fit for this game and Ancelotti revealed in his pre-match press conference that the Colombian won’t make it.
Apart from Rodriguez the only other first-team squad absentee is inevitably Jean-Philippe Gbamin out again for the rest of the campaign.
West Ham’s fine season while surprising to many is similar to what their manager David Moyes achieved at Goodison Park fifteen years ago.
Then Moyes managed to get a mediocre Everton team into the Champions League in 2004-05 playing in basically exactlty the same way as he’s doing with West Ham.
He made them hard to beat and well organised and having manged to achieve enough wins they eventually finished fourth.
Despite the historical record between the clubs this is likely to be a tough match to call as West Ham have plenty to play for despite an inconsistent time recently. But it’s a game the away team have to win yet again if they are to have any chance of resurecting anything from this season.