A Farewell to Dyche | A retrospective of his two years at Everton

Yesterday at 05:00 AM

Taking a balanced look at the former manager's spell with the Toffees

Earlier this week Everton finally took the step of sacking manager Sean Dyche following a miserable run this season that has seen the Blues win just thrice in the Premier League at the halfway mark of the season. After three consecutive relegation battles, Evertonians have no appetite for yet another dogfight but here we find ourselves once again, just a point clear of the drop zone.

There is no doubting that the Everton manager position has been a poisoned chalice of sorts, especially under the former owner Farhad Moshiri, who oversaw eight permanent managers in just under nine years of being the majority shareholder. Along with former chairman the late Bill Kenwright, the Board has variously been accused of meddling in footballing affairs and then flat out disappearing when leadership was most needed.

The club in that time has gone from overflowing coffers with money being thrown injudiciously at both players past their prime and others who were simply overrated with no clear transfer strategy employed to the situation where the club were docked points last season for breaking Profit and Sustainability Regulations around spending.

Dyche can be credited for a period of stability where he managed a threadbare squad shorn of quality and talent, keeping them in the Premier League when by all rights we should have gone down. He instilled once again in the squad a grit and work ethic that had been missing for years.

However, with some more talent added to the squad this season, it appeared Dyche had run out of ideas on how to implement a more expansive gameplan. The resolute defence last season that was more a top six level was gone, with the Blues being torn apart behind more frequently than not. His solution to firming up the backline was at the cost of any sort of attacking philosophy, leading to the grim situation where the Blues haven't scored in eight of their last ten league games.

This week though it appears that Dyche simply gave up, having informed the new owners The Friedkin Group that he felt he had taken the club as far as it could go. While that pretty much sealed his exit, the former manager continued to fight to be paid a sizeable portion of his £5 million a year wages, with discussions on his severance package leading to his finally being sacked on the day of the game. That certainly will leave a bad taste in the mouth of most fans, including those who backed the manager to pull off another rescue act this spring.

Indeed, announcing the departure of a manager just over three hours before kickoff — albeit an FA Cup Third Round game against lower division opposition — is quite unprecedented, but also not surprising given how unconventional Dyche's tenure was.

His recent press conferences, especially after the news had broken of the takeover, showed a mirthless man who seemed more interested in talking down to fans and journalists than taking accountability for his decisions and the club's lowly ranking. Certainly, the club's new owners have now already shown that they will run their footballing operations like they do their other successful businesses.

There is some sort of close-the-loop irony with Dyche getting released after the loss at AFC Bournemouth. Two comprehenive defeats to the Cherries in the league and then the League Cup just before the World Cup break had pretty much doomed Frank Lampard, and when Dyche stepped in to replace him in January 2023, it was a last day win at Goodison against the Cherries that secured Premier League survival to close out that season.

This season, after two heavy defeats to open the campaign, the Blues were leading two-nil at home against Bournemouth with just minutes to play when the visitors mounted an improbable comeback to win 3-2 with a flabbergasted Dyche looking helpless in the dugout.

And finally, his last game in charge was once again against the Cherries, a loss last weekend on the South Coast where the Blues looked aimless as they strived for a scoreless draw until the hosts finally breached their defence in the closing stages. Not a single shot on goal in over ninety minutes pretty much summed up Dyche's lack of a Plan B and inability to adjust.

All said, Dyche will leave the club to mixed reviews, quite unlike say Rafa Benitez who left somehow even more hated than when he started - a successful former Liverpool manager who had previously insulted the Toffees then managing such an abysmal record with the clubs that the brickbats flung in his direction might have felt like a blessed relief.

POSITIVES

Believe it or not, it was not all strife and tribulations during the two years Dyche was in charge, and there were certainly moments sprinkled in there that made us proud once again to be Blues.

Primarily amongst those would be surviving relegation in two straight campaigns, one by the skin of by our teeth and the other comfortably in the end against all odds despite getting ten priceless points deducted.

When Dyche took over after the sacking of Lampard, the Blues looked hapless, much like they do now. They had 15 points from 20 games (15 goals scored, 28 conceded) with just three wins that season sitting in 19th above only Southampton. This year we still have just the three wins, and have managed 17 points from 19 games (15 goals scored, 25 conceded) but are in 16th place thanks to the three newly-promoted sides (including the Saints again) and Wolves also unable to get things right.

The 'new manager bounce' did seem to take effect right away though for the Toffees, with Dyche managing a gritty 1-0 win over league leaders Arsenal. Within a couple of months the Blues had clambered out of the basement, and his blue-collar ways had galvanized the supporters behind the squad once again after a wave of euphoria had carried the team to survival the previous season.

Still, it did come down to the last day of the season with the Blues in 17th spot two points clear of Leicester City. The Foxes jumped into an early lead which would be enough to secure their survival at Everton's expense given their favourable goal difference, but Dyche's favourite Abdoulaye Doucoure's 57th minute volley extended the Blues' unbroken 69-year stay in the English top flight.

Last season was relatively less traumatic to end the campaign, as the Toffees comfortably beat the drop finishing in 15th place with 40 points, despite a hitherto unheard of ten-point deduction. That was primarily helped by a solid defence anchored by stand-in captain James Tarkowski and Jarrad Branthwaite, with the Blues having the fourth-best defence in the league despite their lowly standing.

Again Dyche led from the front despite an almost invisible leadership behind him, serving as a club figurehead as both owner and chairman went missing. That only served to enshrine his cult hero status amongst the fanbase as the manager was forced to speak on behalf of the club on all matters, whether it was transfer activity, on-pitch performance or even construction status on the new stadium being built at the Bramley-Moore dock.

NEGATIVES

It hasn't been all roses however, and while there might have been signs of some of his shortcomings last season, as long as the points kept coming they were easy to overlook.

Coming into the 2024-25 campaign, it was confirmed that this would be the last season the Blues would be playing at their storied home since 1892, Goodison Park. This basically meant there would be just 19 games to play at what was once known as Fortress Goodison. Dyche was handed a roster that was quite similar to last season's, minus midfielder Amadou Onana but with some important additions including Iliman Ndiaye, Jesper Lindstrom, Armando Broja, Jake O'Brien, Tim Iroegbunam, and Orel Mangala. Surely that would be enough to secure a mentally-relaxing final season at the Grand Old Lady?

What we saw instead was a return to Dyche's old ways, where he chose experience over youth, stability over innovation and ultimately a tactically stale gameplan that had the Blues haring about for the first twenty minutes or so, and whether they scored in that time or not, they would then shut up shop and resort to Route 1 long ball football for the rest of the game, irrespective of the personnel he had on the pitch.

Speaking of players, much-vaunted defender O'Brien, signed for a princely sum of £17 million that the Toffees could barely afford, is yet to start a league game for Everton with Dyche choosing to go with one of his pet players Michael Keane for much of the early season while Branthwaite was recovering from surgery.

Then there's the saga of Doucoure, who has been a trusty lieutenant for the former boss for a couple of years now but has clearly lost a step or two this season. Yet Dyche insisted until the bitter end to keep starting him at the #10 position despite his obvious shortcomings in link-up play.

The former gaffer's insistence that he would rather not play a footballer he didn't approve the signing of led to the curious situation where the wily Ndiaye continues to plough a furrow up and down the left flank while the very one-footed Dwight McNeil (another former player of his from Burnley) looks lost in the middle. As a result Everton are able to put in a sum total of zero crosses a game to the lonely Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Beto, depending on whichever striker gets the nod to perform the truly thankless task of chasing long balls from Jordan Pickford for ninety minutes.

Dyche's infamous vomit-inducing 'bleep test' to greet the players back from summer vacations to the preseason aside, it's hard to say that he was much loved by his players either. In March last year during a midseason break to Portugal he appeared to go too far when reports emerged that he had 'slapped' Nathan Patterson, something he later claimed was false.

Unconfirmed rumours from the dressing room have indicated that many of the attacking players were disillusioned by his methods and insistence that they provide extensive defensive cover, which lends credence to the stats that the Blues are one of the slowest teams on the counter attack. The players often look gassed even before they step out onto the pitch.

There have also been reports that training sessions are often unstructured free-for-alls, and the departure of Alex Scanlon has hurt the performances too with the first team analyst credited for the Blues' dominance on set-pieces last season.

STATISTICS

While Dyche will look back at his two years at Everton and show that he led the club to safety in both seasons that he completed, the numbers themselves are quite uninspiring.

Everton featured in 84 games with Dyche in charge, 26 of those were wins, another 26 were draws and 32 were defeats. The Toffees scored 88 times in those games, just a shade over one goal a game while they conceded 111 times, about 1.3 goals per game.

In terms of points percentage, that puts him just behind Walter Smith. Dyche's 41.3% is just ahead of the much-hated Rafa Benitez' 39.4%, but outside the bottom three of Howard Kendall's doomed second stint of 36.5%, Frank Lampard at 33.3% and the infamous Mike Walker with 27.6%.

When you put it in terms of win percentage, Dyche is at 31.0%, Benitez at 31.8% and Lampard on 27.3% - testament that the Toffees' recent squads have been downright awful no matter who has been in charge. Moyes was at a points percentage of 51.0% for his twelve years at the Blues and a win percentage of 42.1%, so it'll certainly be interesting to see if the numbers he can attain are more at his previous level or what we've gotten used to in recent years.

In closing, it's fair to say that Dyche was in charge of Everton in unprecedented times with Moshiri's absent ownership and a Board that was equally invisible, with the manager having to field questions about the club's financial position even as the Premier League was deducting points for PSR violations.

Within his limited tactical ability, Dyche did manage to get the Blues tighten up their defence but it's hard to fault him for some utterly atrocious finishing from most of Everton's forwards during his two years here. Still, the Toffees have been difficult to watch more often than not and that does stem from the manager.

As a fanbase we can thank the gravelly-voiced fiery manager for ensuring survival over two seasons, but can also see that he seemed to give up on the Blues especially once the Friedkin Group took over and asked him to be accountable. On that alone it was the right decision to part ways with Dyche now while there is still time to firm up the club's standing ahead of a massive move to a stunning new stadium next season.