Aston Villa 3-2 Everton: Three Takeaways | Reassessment Needed After Latest Calamity
09/16/2024 01:06 PM
Sean Dyche must stop the rot this week, no excuses
Cautious, Yet Easy to Play Against
As anticipated, Everton set up to play defensively at Villa Park on Saturday. This shouldn't have surprised anybody, given the discrepancy in talent between the two squads and their respective aspiration levels for the current season — not to mention how both clubs have started the campaign. In the continuing, very costly absence of star defender Jarrad Branthwaite, the Blues back line is not exactly blessed with recovery pace, so manager Sean Dyche had little option but to set up in a low block, given the quickness of the Aston Villa attack.
Doing so limits the ability of the team's midfield and forwards to press high, which results in an extremely low share of possession and the game being largely played in Everton's half. A staggering 69% of Villa's 602 completed passes were made in the opposition half, compared to only 47.3% of the away side's meagre 182. The Blues commanded a mere 27% of the ball; a frankly pitiful 22% in the opening 45 minutes. Much as in the Toffees' other away trip this season, against Tottenham Hotspur, they were put under significant early pressure and could easily have conceded before Dwight McNeil's unexpected goal in the 16th minute.
That came courtesy of a rare piece of effective pressing by the visitors, McNeil dispossessing Amadou Onana, with the ex-Blue caught dawdling on the ball in his own half. The midfielder's well-placed but low-power effort surprisingly beat the normally reliable Emiliano Martinez from range, from an xG (Expected Goals) chance of just 0.02. The setback appeared to stun Villa, who failed to react in the next eleven minutes, before McNeil's nicely flighted free kick was met by an expertly guided header from Dominic Calvert-Lewin, to put the Blues into a healthy 2-0 lead.
Where have we seen this before?
This time, the hosts stepped it up, dominating possession and probing for openings, and Everton cracked in the 36th, conceding another simply-crafted goal, nodded home from point-blank range from Ollie Watkins, who was ostensibly being marked by Michael Keane. The writing appeared to be on the wall from that point, in truth. I'd expected the Toffees to lose this game comfortably, but they'd somehow found themselves in a two-goal lead, due more to sloppiness from Villa than any great play from themselves. The Blues had a couple of opportunities to score again in the second half, via Calvert-Lewin, but it was generally one-way traffic, with the Midland outfit moving Everton around and probing for openings.
Playing so cautiously away from home against so-far superior sides is not working for Everton, as they are not structurally resilient enough to withstand the pressure they invite upon themselves. Across all four league matches to date, the Merseysiders have permitted 27 shots on target, for a combined xG of 8.13 — alarmingly, 6.85 of that from open play, showing how easy they are to create chances against. By contrast, Everton have hit the target 12 times, generated an xG of 4.34, but with only 2.43 of that from general play. It's not really a statistic I'm too fond of, but the Blues have given up 19 so-called "big chances", which is unsustainable if they are to win games.
Leaking Goals
Dyche's big claim to fame as a manager is that he favours defensibly responsible, pragmatic football. He is not an advocate of playing out from the back, presumably taking the view that the risk in doing so outweighs any potential benefit. The ex-Burnley chieftain also doesn't like to see his players take chances running with the ball, except in the opposition third. The end result of such an approach is the kind of direct passing game with which he's been long associated. On Saturday, 18.5% of Everton's passes were considered to be long, in comparison to just five percent from Villa, which is about par for the course.
A positive aspect of the this style of play is that the team is less inclined to commit the kind of costly turnovers in dangerous areas that saw Idrissa Gueye give Brighton their second goal on the opening weekend. Instead, possession is cheaply conceded from hacked clearances (the visitors had 28, more than three times that of Villa) and hopeful long balls up to the often isolated striker — Calvert-Lewin in this case. This results in the side conceding possession easily, allowing the opposition to recycle into attack after attack, which we saw at the weekend.
Last term, Everton's defensive record was very solid - ranking fourth in the division, in terms of goals conceded (51). The underlying xGA (Expected Goals Allowed) metric of 55.2 reinforced the impression that the club was defensively stout. Given that the team only found the back of the net themselves on 40 occasions (ranking 19th, ahead of only relegated Sheffield United), from an xG of 54.0, this was just as well. The linchpins of this success were Jordan Pickford's impressive form, with the goalkeeper shipping 4.4 less goals than could be expected from the data, and an insane number of blocked shots from James Tarkowski, who led the league with 56 — a mind-boggling 17 more than anyone else.
Obviously, another major contributing factor was the unexpectedly high performance level of new starting centre half Jarrad Branthwaite, who formed a nicely balanced defensive duo with Tarkowski. This season, the £80m valued defender has so far been unavailable, and in his place Dyche has elected to once more return Keane into the starting lineup, over summer signing Jake O'Brien. This decision has largely proven controversial with the fans, given the availability of the Irishman and seeing as how Keane had been dropped as a starter two years ago, following a major decline in form.
Since Dyche took over at Everton at the end of January 2022, he's restored Keane during several spells and it's fair to say that these have not been successful. The defender has started 22 league games under Dyche and the team has shipped 50 goals — an astonishing average of 2.27 per match. Without Keane in the starting eleven, the Toffees have allowed 43 goals in 38 games (1.13 per outing). This is a sufficiently large data set, over a long enough period of time, to confirm that the Blues are defensively far less secure with Keane selected. But is O'Brien a valid option as a replacement?
The argument has been put forward that the giant centre half is not ready for the rigours of the Premier League, experience of which we know Dyche puts great store in. However, Branthwaite himself had played just six games in the English top flight, prior to his successful loan spell with PSV. Apart from his debut, Everton lost all five, conceding a staggering 19 goals and Branthwaite received a straight red card in his final appearance, against Brentford's Ivan Toney at Goodison Park. O'Brien's stint with Lyon last season, in which the Irishman played 32 times, with 27 starts, compares favourably with Branthwaite's spell at PSV, as Ligue 1 is a stronger division than the Eredvisie.
We can assume that O'Brien has been signed as an eventual replacement for either the young England man, or the veteran Tarkowski, should Everton somehow be able to retain Branthwaite next season. But how will the player develop, so as to be ready to step in for either, without playing? Can a man who played in the French Cup final in May, against Kylian Mbappé's PSG, be so far off the required level that Keane, a player with no future at the club and who, when selected, is part of a unit which concedes well north of two goals per game, be preferred? With Branthwaite's return imminent, it appears we'll see little of the defender whom Everton chose to spend almost €20m of its limited funds on in the summer.
Full Back is a Mess
The money splashed on a man who is apparently behind Keane, as the club's fourth choice centre back, serves merely to highlight the ongoing train wreck we are witnessing at fullback. It appears that Vitalii Mykolenko's early departure during the Villa match was due to illness, rather than injury, though the episode served as a reminder that Ashley Young is the only viable backup option at left back. Since Young was also deputizing at right back, for the injured pair of Seamus Coleman and Nathan Patterson, this necessitated the 39-year-old to switch flanks partway through the opening period.
Dyche did have youngster Roman Dixon available on the bench, but elected to introduce midfielder James Garner to fill in for Young. The ex-Manchester United man played right back in the European Under-21 finals in the summer of last year, though had spent only eight minutes in the position for Everton, filling in for the red-carded Young in the Anfield derby last season. Given that he's a hard-working, energetic player, capable of putting in a decent cross, I'd figured that Garner could be converted into a solid full back, but alas he struggled mightily on Saturday.
Caught inside and unable to stop the cross for Villa's opener, he experienced major issues with his positioning, staying in line with the rest of the defence and also tracking runners. He didn't coordinate well with Jack Harrison, playing ahead of him on the wing. The on-loan Leeds United man failed to track Lucas Digne for Watkins' first goal and Villa targeted Everton's right throughout, with 43% of their play going down that side. Can Garner do better given proper training sessions as a right back? Possibly so, but the position is a car-crash currently.
The Toffees have not fielded the same player at right back in consecutive games yet. O'Brien was even deployed awkwardly there for a spell at the weekend, the sight of the 6'6 centre half awkwardly filling in as the team changed shape multiple times amid a rising lack of cohesion not being something I wish to see again, in all honesty. Dyche's basic defensive scheme is to congest the centre and force opponents to the outside, but with Everton's full backs failing to prevent crosses raining in and the likes of Keane getting comfortably beaten in the air by the much shorter Watkins, solutions are not going to be easily arrived at.
Statistics provided courtesy of fbref.com, transfermarket.com, fotmob.com and whoscored.com
