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Burnley or Everton, Everton or Burnley, or both, or how about neither? Apparently not an option. If it was, Leeds fans would have discovered it while every permutation of the Premier League table was being mulled and analysed and clickbait websites were claiming hysterically that ‘supercomputers’ are still a thing even though, like, iPhones exist now. (They have calculators on them! It’s a supercomputer in your pocket!)
IMPORTANT UPDATE
Some readers may have formed the impression that this blog post, written the morning after Everton lost a crucial relegation match away to Burnley, was sceptical about Frank Lampard Junior’s ability to rescue the Toffees from their impending plunge into the Championship. Those readers were right! Based on that match, you’d definitely back Sean Dyche and Burnley to overtake Everton from here. However, here at The Square Ball, we are always open to hearing alternative unbiased evidence-based viewpoints and reconsidering our opinions.
As such we are updating this article to reflect thoughts expressed this Thursday night on BT Sport. In the video clip below, BT presenter Jake Humphrey, wriggling uncomfortably in his chair, puts a tweet from journalist Ryan Taylor on a screen, that says Everton’s players ‘look uncoachable’, that even so Lampard ‘looks out of his depth’, and that the only hope is for Duncan Ferguson to take over: ‘Big Dunc or bust’. Jake is seeking opinions on this from players turned pundits Rio Ferdinand and Joe Cole.
Frank Lampard once did a blurb for Jake Humphrey’s book, High Performance, telling potential readers, ‘I urge you to open this book and open your mind to the lessons within’. Here, Humphrey reads the tweet to his guests, dismissing with a shrug the part about Lampard looking out of his depth and saying he doesn’t think Big Dunc can be the answer. “How can you judge a manager with those players, in this situation?” Jake asks rhetorically, before turning to his guests.
“Frank Lampard is made of the right stuff,” says Rio Ferdinand, who has been friends with Lampard since they were in the West Ham youth team together from the age of fourteen, and played in the West Ham first team with him from 1995 to 2000, at a time when the side were managed by Lampard’s uncle Harry Redknapp and coached by his dad, and for England at Under-21 and senior levels from 1997 to 2011, and was filmed in a sex tape with Frank and Kieron Dyer in Ayia Napa in 2000. “One game can change everything,” Rio adds. “They’re not out of it at all.”
“That’s a good point,” says Jake. “All it takes is a couple of wins, and then we’re having a very different conversation, and Frank’s the saviour of a club that are in a really difficult position.”
That would be great for Frank! ‘Frank the Saviour of a club in crisis’ is definitely a more marketable brand than ‘Frank the failure who relegated Everton from the top flight for the first time since 1954’.
“Frank, like,” says Joe Cole, who played with Lampard at West Ham from 1998 to 2001, then at Chelsea from 2003 to 2010, and in the England team from 2001 to 2010, “I don’t think he realised the task when he got in. The players there are playing on reputation, rather than actual performance.”
Certainly not something Frank Lampard could ever be accused of! Cole goes on to say it’s like Frank has bought something off the market, and they sold him “a great product”, but when he’s got it home he’s found out it’s falling apart. But, “Rio’s right, Frank’s made of the right stuff. Fantastic job at Derby. He done a great job at Chelsea. And Everton is in a bad, bad way.”
“A win or two, and the story changes,” Jake says, again, as if he didn’t just say it. “And we’ve got his back.”
Okay, so this has turned out not to be the unbiased evidence-based viewpoints we expected, it’s just three blokes who have been friends with Frank Lampard and his family for nearly thirty years saying he’s a great guy and if Everton go down it won’t be his fault, but the fault of people at Everton who are “playing on reputation, rather than actual performance.” And that definitely doesn’t include Frank Lampard Junior! Maybe Duncan Ferguson will think they mean him, and ask for his right to reply to the three of them, one at a time or all at once.
END OF IMPORTANT UPDATE
Trying to decide what the best result of this game would be for Leeds was an unanswerable dilemma, and the best solution was to simply accept that the Peacocks would lose a little either way but beating Watford on Saturday (plus everybody else after that, please) will mean it won’t matter. Then to sit back, relax, and make your rooting choice on much more solid ground: which of the managers would you rather see crying?
Let’s think. On the one hand, it’s hard to love Sean Dyche. And he never seems like he’d be bothered by that anyway. His charge sheet includes being mean to Pat Bamford when young Bambo was dropped off by his parents for his first day on loan, but few of us can look in the mirror and say we’re not a little guilty of the same, so that can be crossed off. But on the other hand, there’s Frank Lampard Junior over in the other technical area (he doesn’t go in the actual dugout because Duncan Ferguson is always there, glaring at him). And honestly it’s a waste of time trying to weigh up the Dyche pros and cons when it’s obviously Lampard we want to see crying, always Lampard.
We got what we wanted even if the league table doesn’t feel that way. Burnley’s 3-2 win puts them six points behind us, with six points in hand to play for, but don’t go thinking that beating Everton makes them good bets to beat West Ham, Southampton, Wolves et al in the coming weeks, even if they get back to back wins by beating Norwich this weekend. Burnley had not scored a single goal in their last four games, all defeats; they’ve scored ten goals in thirteen games this year. Even those numbers are juiced by a beleaguered Brighton letting them win 3-0. Burnley can’t get goals, they have to be given them. Hence Everton, who gave them three, and are the real story here.
The chorus is singing with one voice: Everton look like a team going down. It’s in the kit they wore for this game, a white shirt with a tyre-track down the front, like our Macron x Warnock abomination of 2013. It’s centre-back Mason Holgate in defensive midfield, like when Eddie Gray desperately tried to hold off our relegation in 2004 with what fashion would now call a double-pivot of Dom Matteo and Lucas Radebe. It’s in coming back from conceding early at a weak corner by scoring two penalties then losing anyway. It’s in the players and Lampard trudging off Turf Moor without acknowledging the travelling fans. It’s in Frank’s haunted frown while explaining the result to Sky, looking as pale and nervous as when he had to explain to the Chelsea board what he, John Terry, Jody Morris and the rest had been doing in that Heathrow hotel the day after 9/11. You can picture him back then, the distraught young man with his face lowered, anxiously running his fingers through his thick, luxurious hair, and see now how few options are left to him. All he can say is that the players have to work, everybody has to work — while remembering he’ll have Big Dunc in his office in the morning asking, ‘So you think we don’t do any work, Frank?’ His one moment for feeling like himself came when he bristled at suggestions his players and staff don’t have what it takes to avoid relegation, because they’re too used to the easy life. Frank never feels better than when he’s correcting someone. “We’ve got people in here who have been involved in relegation,” he told Sky, with his ‘so, actually’ eyebrow raised, locking eye contact with the journalist who dared to suggest otherwise. “People in my staff who have been involved in relegation.” So there.
You don’t even need to ask Sean Dyche that sort of question because he’s seen it all and done it all. And he can see that Everton aren’t ready for what’s happening to them. “Sometimes, it’s hard to explain, but you might sense that a team have lost how to win a game,” he told Sky. “I said at half-time, I’m not sure these know how to win a game, lads.”
Burnley were 2-1 down at half-time and both teams looked pretty hopeless. I say this with some certainty, as an appeal for justice to be reflected in the final league standings: Leeds United are better than both of these teams. But Dyche is realistic about playing to strengths, and on the left Charlie Taylor had total attacking authority over Jonjoe Kenny. Back when we played Burnley at Elland Road, our Rob Conlon wrote about how Taylor looked just the same as he did when he left Leeds, not much better, not much worse, for all his years in the Premier League. And Taylor made Burnley’s equaliser by being as good as I remember him at Leeds, kicking the ball into space past Kenny, chasing the ball down, taking it from the chalk on the wing to the chalk on the byline, a touch to make you think he’s gone too far, a low cross into the six-yard box that Jay Rodriguez couldn’t miss. Then in the 85th minute Taylor took the ball from a throw-in and Everton’s defensive contribution was to stand and look at him for a while until he crossed towards their Ben Godfrey, whose swinging miss of a clearance onto his standing foot was £20m-from-Norwich of quality and let Matej Vydra, the Bamford who could have been, calmly pass to Burnley’s best attacker, Maxwel Cornet, unmarked in front of the penalty spot. Because when you’re an Everton defender in the 85th minute of a vital relegation match you have to fight and work to win, the best thing to do is stand and watch while Burnley score.
"A CHILLING MOMENT FOR EVERTON… IT'S A DEFENSIVE DISASTER" ????
It's a HUGE goal for Burnley as Maxwel Cornet makes it 3-2 against relegation rivals Everton – Turf Moor goes wild! ???? pic.twitter.com/eOfJ32AHlE
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) April 6, 2022
The result wasn’t comfortable for Burnley because they are also very bad. Lampard’s last chance was throwing on Salomón Rondón, and he got a huge chance in the 91st minute when James Tarkowski, who looks so bad every time I watch him that his rumoured big money move to Newcastle should happen and be funny, aimed a diving header at thin air and Rondón snatched at a half-volley with his shin, putting it wide. Burnley’s incompetence isn’t only that they can’t score (except against Everton), but their infamous dourness isn’t keeping the goals out: thirteen conceded in their last six.
Burnley are hard to predict right now, though. They’d only won one league game before mid-February, when Dyche must have growled at them to turn it on. A draw at home to Scum, a 1-0 defeat to Liverpool and back to back wins over Brighton and Spurs were a revival of sorts. Then they lost four without scoring. They could get another win at Norwich on Sunday, but will that turn into a sustained period of form in the weeks ahead? And even if it does, do Everton look like following them out, or taking their place going down? Here’s Burnley, quietly self-assured, confident even at 2-1 down. And there’s Everton, top tier fixtures since 1954, imploding, looking like they don’t know how to win and expecting Frank Lampard to come up with answers against Scum, Leicester, Liverpool, Chelsea and Leicester again in the next four weeks. This could be a lot of fun to watch, so long as Leeds stay above it. ⬢
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