Everton v Bournemouth

The officials are having a laugh.
No VAR, just 1 goal and an injury to Pickford.
What have I missed?

Fuck me I just started crying. I actually started crying.

We did it. Half a team, no strikers, no fullbacks, injuries all over the shop and we only fucking stayed up. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

Pint of wine, anyone?

Made 4 Gwladys wrote:

Tonteau wrote:Pint of wine, anyone?

I just opened a bottle of Jameson malt ... I'm going to get totally smashed

I'm fucking exhausted,,, finished

That’s it. Exhausted.

I just laughed for a couple of minutes.
The Duke, The Dyche, The din, the drugs I'll need to get my blood pressure down.

OK where to now?
Will Dyche stay? Do we get killed by FFP?
What can we plan without a FFP decision.....soon.
Get the roof on the new stadium and let's have a proper plan.

Just another final day in the PL.

Rotterdam 1985 wrote:

Thinking about it earlier, one thing struck me as being pretty important tomorrow, and that's don't concede early. Get to half-time 0-0, that's absolutely fine. Don't turn Goodison into a pit of worry by going 1-0 down early on. We want the crowd to be hopeful and encouraging, not angry and disparaging. Don't give Leicester and Leeds (and Bournemouth, for that matter) any more encouragement than they need.

A 0-0 might even be enough for us if results elsewhere look like they're going our way. We're all thinking where the goals are coming from. I'm thinking one, we might only need one, and that can come from a corner or a penalty or a Gray worldie or whatever. If we have to wait until the 78th minute for that goal, well OK. We just can't afford to do what we did against Wimbledon, or Palace, and give ourselves a mountain to climb. Dortmund did that to themselves today, they only had to win at home to win the league but they went 2-0 down early, they kept their rivals believing, and they ran out of time to fix it.

To hell with false modesty, fuck it, I called it. My master plan worked.  

Me and my lad are off to have a beer or two. Not to celebrate, but to just talk optimistically about Everton for the first time in months.

Lads, I love you all.

So happy that’s finally over. Great to see Leeds and Leicester going down. Maybe I was a bit sensitive/nervous but Sky commentary were really pushing a narrative of a Everton losing and going down. So I’m happy I don’t pay a subscription to them. Great goal from Dacoure and some save from Pickford in injury time. Fair play to the players that kept fighting the last few months, which has probably kept us up.

Top 4 next season?

Made 4 Gwladys wrote:

Yankthattoffee wrote:I just laughed for a couple of minutes.
The Duke, The Dyche, The din, the drugs I'll need to get my blood pressure down.

OK where to now?
Will Dyche stay? Do we get killed by FFP?
What can we plan without a FFP decision.....soon.
Get the roof on the new stadium and let's have a proper plan.

Just another final day in the PL.

and sign a bloody striker !!!!!

If FFP people allow us.


btw, I have just realised that Bournemouth must have won the toss and chose the wrong way.
Barstewards trying to mess with us from the start.

was nervy as fook, 10 mins felt like an hour, nonetheless tho, we did it we escaped
let@s hope this is a lesson learned and never to be repeated

get investment in, get the ground sorted, get the shite outta the team and board. total rebuild , then deal with the FFP sanctions ( if any )

Armchair wrote:I'm going to be on a train travelling through France tomorrow afternoon. Which is probably the best place to be.

Quite pleased I could only read the text updates. Surprisingly not too stressful.

So how do we stop this happening again (again)?

Tonteau wrote:Ah the feeling of existential dread. Just back from lunch at the pub with my dad. Managed to forget about this for as long as was reasonable, but you can’t hide forever.

I’m with you Rotts, the fallout, media coverage and general gnashing of teeth will be worse than visiting West Brom or Sunderland. However, as it’s us you just know that people will be dissecting it for the whole of next season and we’ll beyond if we don’t go up straight away. This, in many ways, will be the worst thing about it.

I managed to get a golf league match tee time scheduled for 16:15pm. Came off the course at 20.15 (Match All Square - had to win the last 3 holes) and started breathing again.

Armchair wrote:

Armchair wrote:I'm going to be on a train travelling through France tomorrow afternoon. Which is probably the best place to be.

Quite pleased I could only read the text updates. Surprisingly not too stressful.

So how do we stop this happening again (again)?

The difference between now and 12 months ago is that we have a gaffer who appears to know what he's doing. Dyche hasn't got everything right since he came in (selecting Keane over Mina for a while was particularly weird) but he's still worked something of a miracle in keeping us up.

Bizarrely there is some (admittedly low-level) debate on Everton twitter over whether he should remain or not. But what do Evertonians want, say, over the next five years? We aren't dreamers, we don't demand top 4 during that time. We simply want some stability, normality and respectability. Mid-table boredom. To that end, it's nice to think that we might have a manager in place who will see us through those five years.

So, to stop it happening again, we give him some players - a squad - that he can make use of, simple as that. Dyche likes to have three or four strikers he can rotate. Three or four strikers? I know, right?! And we are in need of some serious surgery to the back four.

There will be a lot of talk now from fans and the media about the board. Although I'd very much like to see the back of most of them, in the short-term I think that's incidental. I'm more interested in who we can bring in to strengthen the team. We recruited pretty well last summer - Onana, McNeill, Tarko and Garner were very good signings. Coady did a job on loan, played his part. Maupay was the only dud we wasted money on. Vinagre, I don't think even exists, that must be some kind of tax fiddle.

We need the same and more this summer. We need to ship some players out and bring in (conservative estimate) 7 or 8 new faces, of whom a couple can be squaddies but the rest need to be starting PL calibre. We can't afford too many Maupay-level duds. That's all that matters. I'll pay attention to the board rumblings but it will be background noise, for me, compared to what we do with the squad.

I'm actually looking forward to being able to look to the future. With a degree of trepidation, of course - there is no guarantee right now that we'll reach our mid-table nirvana next season - but with hope as well. I haven't wanted to do this in recent months but I might put together a squad review in the next few days, to analyse where we need improvement. Which I think is basically everywhere apart from GK and centre mid.

the rumours are Everton will dealt with over the summer as we have only 1 charge to defend. The gossip in London is something between 6 and 15 points will be deducted at the start,

The haste is driven by the fact that the FA wants to be seen as regulating as opposed to doing nothing and being forced to accept an independent external regulator. So just like Oumar Niasse was the only striker to be retrospectively punished in the "diving clampdown" mandated by the FA; we will be the sacrificial lambs once more. As a team facing an ADDITIONAL 120+ cases of transgression spins it out.

Fish rot from the head

Da Judge wrote:the rumours are Everton will dealt with over the summer as we have only 1 charge to defend. The gossip in London is something between 6 and 15 points will be deducted at the start,

The haste is driven by the fact that the FA wants to be seen as regulating as opposed to doing nothing and being forced to accept an independent external regulator. So just like Oumar Niasse was the only striker to be retrospectively punished in the "diving clampdown" mandated by the FA; we will be the sacrificial lambs once more. As a team facing an ADDITIONAL 120+ cases of transgression spins it out.

Fish rot from the head

In any case, the cheating from City has already served its purpose. It's established them as a global football powerhouse. What's the worst that could happen to them? Even if they were relegated, it's one season in the wilderness. They'd come straight back up and carry on as though nothing had happened. They can ride out a season without CL qualification, because they have no money concerns. A mere blip in their progression towards world domination.

A link to the post-match scenes on the pitch...



And for some schadenfreude, the same from Leicester, while they waited for our game to finish...

Rotterdam 1985 wrote:

Armchair wrote:

Armchair wrote:I'm going to be on a train travelling through France tomorrow afternoon. Which is probably the best place to be.

Quite pleased I could only read the text updates. Surprisingly not too stressful.

So how do we stop this happening again (again)?

The difference between now and 12 months ago is that we have a gaffer who appears to know what he's doing. Dyche hasn't got everything right since he came in (selecting Keane over Mina for a while was particularly weird) but he's still worked something of a miracle in keeping us up.

Bizarrely there is some (admittedly low-level) debate on Everton twitter over whether he should remain or not. But what do Evertonians want, say, over the next five years? We aren't dreamers, we don't demand top 4 during that time. We simply want some stability, normality and respectability. Mid-table boredom. To that end, it's nice to think that we might have a manager in place who will see us through those five years.

So, to stop it happening again, we give him some players - a squad - that he can make use of, simple as that. Dyche likes to have three or four strikers he can rotate. Three or four strikers? I know, right?! And we are in need of some serious surgery to the back four.

There will be a lot of talk now from fans and the media about the board. Although I'd very much like to see the back of most of them, in the short-term I think that's incidental. I'm more interested in who we can bring in to strengthen the team. We recruited pretty well last summer - Onana, McNeill, Tarko and Garner were very good signings. Coady did a job on loan, played his part. Maupay was the only dud we wasted money on. Vinagre, I don't think even exists, that must be some kind of tax fiddle.

We need the same and more this summer. We need to ship some players out and bring in (conservative estimate) 7 or 8 new faces, of whom a couple can be squaddies but the rest need to be starting PL calibre. We can't afford too many Maupay-level duds. That's all that matters. I'll pay attention to the board rumblings but it will be background noise, for me, compared to what we do with the squad.

I'm actually looking forward to being able to look to the future. With a degree of trepidation, of course - there is no guarantee right now that we'll reach our mid-table nirvana next season - but with hope as well. I haven't wanted to do this in recent months but I might put together a squad review in the next few days, to analyse where we need improvement. Which I think is basically everywhere apart from GK and centre mid.

Not really the time for this but I can’t sleep at the moment. Looking at the table, seven teams have worse defensive records than us but only wolves scored fewer than us (they also conceded more than us, keep an eye on them for the drop next season). We won 5 games under Dyche, four of them 1-0. So we have the foundations of a decent side but my goodness we need some goals. We need to add two proper centre forwards a left back and a right back as a minimum. Leicester scored 17 more goals than us, Leeds 14 more and they both went down so our defensive solidity is a great base to build from.

Word for James Garner today, maybe didn’t catch the headlines but for a kid thrown in at the deep end he’s got some real composure. Could be a player for us, got a proper ‘Moyes bargain buy’ feel about him.