Chermiti medical taking place at Everton as new season looms

Despite recent stories claiming the club were very close to signing Youssef Chermiti, we are still waiting for final confirmation that the Portuguese is an Everton player.

According to a respected journalist Alan Myers Chermiti is having a medical today, the final part of the deal, but as yet there is no official news to underline this is actually happening.

Everton are still to make any formal announcment that the 19-year-old striker has completed all the various stages to his proposed move to Merseyside. Until that happens no one will believe it.

The time it takes to get these transfers over the line is always the most frustrating aspects of the window.

And for the Toffees in particular this process seems to be a very long and drawn out one with things moving at the proverbial snails pace.

With all the club’s financial issues and the difficulty attracting decent talent to a club in almost permanent crisis, this is inevitable.

As we wait for Chermiti to be announced (we hope) there are just a few days left before the new Premier League season kicks off and once again the Blues seem alarmingly ill-prepared in terms of playing talent for that ardous coming campaign.

I don’t doubt that Sean Dyche will have them fit and physically well-prepared, but Everton’s squad is actually smaller than last season’s when the club only avoided relegation on the final day of the season.

That squad was a group of players that Dyche struggled to pick a decent eleven from, especially late on when injuries also hit as usual. So what does that mean for this season’s prospects?

Going into the new campaign the Toffees old problems remain essentially unresolved and the side still lacks enough pace, creativity and most of all firepower up front.

Another transfer window has seen Everton linked with a surfeit of players but of course very little of substance actually happens.

Hopefully, Chermiti can prove an astute aquisition (he has to be!) and help to ease that goal-scoring problem, but in all likelihood given his youth and total lack of Premier League experience, that won’t happen straight away.

The Blues therefore still need more options up front as we keep saying, particularly given Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s terrible injury record.

For now the former England international is fit and will (barring any last-minute problem as happened just before last season started) in all probability start on Saturday against Fulham in the season opener.

But, there is still much work to be done to strengthen this threadbare squad that simply doesn’t look good enough to avoid another long and desperate struggle for survival.