Spurs v Everton Preview: five areas to analyse

Which formation will Lampard decide for Everton to try to arrest away day blues

2. Lampard’s tactical conundrum

While Everton’s last game was a victory against Boreham Wood in the FA Cup, you can pretty much discount anything tactical or even personnel in some positions being used in the Monday night game versus Spurs.

Many players were missing through being cup tied, injury and illness so that gave opportunities to youngsters and fringe players.

While Solomon Rondon with his two goals and others gave Lampard something to think about, it is highly doubtful he will sway too much from the team that narrowly and controversially lost to the league leaders Manchester City last weekend.

The only consideration is whether Lampard should match Everton up with Spurs’ five man defence and play wing backs. I think he will not because of two reasons, one the lack of centre backs at the moment and two he needs the midfield three that did superbly against City to go again.

Donny Van De Beek is fit after an injury scare last weekend which was just a knock, and Allan and Abdoulaye Doucoure came through the midweek cup tie unscathed. These three worked together for the first time last week and complimented each other very well, they must be given this chance again.

Also as we said on the last page, Spurs have been beaten by teams playing a more solid midfield and not playing a high line recently so a tight 4-3-3 formation would be my choice.

Definitely Everton cannot play a high backline anyway with the speed of Michael Keane and Mason Holgate not being the quickest, so I would expect Everton to have a solid seven players sat in to disrupt Spurs’ passing and not let Kane have room to drop in and play in the faster forwards in Son and Kulusevski.

They will require Doucoure and Van De Beek to get forward also, but the full backs I would expect to be more circumspect in this game. Seamus Coleman and JonJoe Kenny should take this responsibility once again, especially as Vitalii Mykolenko had a knock and had to be replaced on Thursday.

This would leave the front three for Everton to play between the wing backs and centre backs, as we will discuss later does this mean it would be best to not play Calvert-Lewin on Monday night?

This could depend on the fitness of Demarai Gray after an illness ruled him out of starting against Boreham Wood.