Crystal Palace vs Everton

hairy cataract wrote:We were unlucky to face a Palace side that had all their best players available.  Eze, Ayou, Olise are all fantastic footballers to watch, full of tricks and ideas and they gave our lads a torrid time.  But, yet again, we've got a result against a team with far more flair than we have.  We're looking solid as fuck, even when faced with dizzying skills and pace, and we're winning as a team.  We need to pick up all the points we can while we're in this mood, because we really don't have much in the way of PL level brilliance.  Harrison and McNeil spend more time defending than attacking, and neither has the pace or trickery to beat defenders regularly, but right now we don't need that.

Dyche is doing a fantastic job, and we're only one win off the top half of the table, which is truly astonishing.

I honestly think Dyche and Moyes were separated at birth. I mean, medical science might quibble with that statement given that there is an eight year age gap, but they are both ginger. Just saying.

Hair colour (and accents) aside, there are echoes here of how Moyes went about things in his early Everton days. Walks into a relegation battle at a time when we didn't have much money and with a laughably thin squad, keeps us up, starts to implement a plan based on workrate and fitness largely driven by the players having to carry bags of cement on their shoulders up a hill for the whole of July, that plan takes a little while to take root, but eventually it does and we end up with a manager whose brand of football is more effective than attractive, but who leads us to stability and respectability if not silverware.

If we were to keep Dyche for the long term then I could even see the end playing out in the same way - after several years of mid-table comfort, knocking at the big clubs' door without being allowed in, and with us having forgotten how horrible relegation battles are, we insist that he's taken us as far as he can and start to agitate for a change. We then get a fancy Spanish manager in who insists on playing seven inverted full-backs and uses algebra to explain his tactics to the players, and the inexorable slide commences afresh.

Anyway, based on this timeline we should finish 7th this year, 17th next year and then 4th the season after that. So my apologies for next season's relegation battle but it'll all be worth it the following year when we get to see the mighty Blues get rogered senseless by the likes of Real Madrid and PSG in the UEFA Champions League Brought To You by Gazprom and Amstel.

Dyche did have a 7th place finish at Burnley, of course. And a 17th. You heard it here first, history repeating.