With less than 24 hours until Everton take on Aston Villa, interim boss Duncan Ferguson has given an update on team news and injuries.
Ferguson has basically a clean bill of health as he looks to pick his first Everton team in his second stint in the dugout.
There are two long-term absences midfielders Fabian Delph and Tom Davies, but neither were likely to have figured too much in Ferguson’s thoughts as he selects his side for Villa tomorrow.
Injuries have been the bane of the last few Toffees managers and both Carlo Ancelotti as well as Rafa Benitez had to deal with a ridculously long list of absences during the last two campaigns. In fact last season every one of the club’s first-team players were hurt at one time or other!
These problems have undermined both their efforts and it has to be said that despite the many tactical and selection mistakes that Benitez made, he was very unlucky with injuries this season.
After a solid start to this campaign the jinx hit again and once that happened the season unravelled and unlike Ancelotti (who did to some extent anyway) he wasn’t able to right the sinking ship.
Even last season though before these absences Ancelotti’s team was flying before his own injury problems struck and destabalised a season that might have ended with qualification for European football, maybe even the Champions League had all his key players stayed healthy.
Anyway, for the moment Ferguson is lucky to have a virtually fully fit squad to pick from and this starts tomorrow against Steven Gerrard’s Villans.
Let’s hope that this trend can continue as having a healthy squad will be critical given that brining in further new players is looking increasingly unlikely and because the strength in depth of the current group of players is very debatable. Too many have failed to perform over and over again for a succession of managers.
So, for Ferguson and whoever follows him as permanent manager – if that’s the case and the Scot dosen’t get the job – will need all the luck he can have if Everton are to get out of this situation.