Everton - Bournemouth

Have been through some shit with this club over the years but rarely have I felt like they've kicked me hard in the guts as much as today.

For a defensive-minded manager to oversee a home loss having been cruising 2-0 up on 87 minutes is unreal, inexplicable and unforgivable.

hairy cataract wrote:Did that really happen?

I know what you mean. I don't even feel angry, just baffled and genuinely sick. I may well feel angry later.

They're driving me to fucking drink, I've just opened a bottle of red at 5pm. Glad my lad is out otherwise I'd be nicking his fags.

It's slow torture, this.

An attempt to rationalise what the fuck happened today...

And I make no promises that this will make sense or be remotely intelligent, but my brain is still fried by that collapse...

So my lad watched the whole game on a stream, until they equalised anyway. He backed up what Hairy said, that we played well and were cruising, in control. He said Bournemouth just brought on a load of quick lads at 2-0 down and they kind of caught us on a counter for the first goal.

At 2-1 in that situation, you can do one of two things - keep control Carlo-style, or panic. Given that our confidence is on the floor, we've done the latter, just sat deep and shat ourselves, willing the final whistle to go. And that's interesting because Carlo basically used to defend one-goal leads from the edge of our box all the time, and it usually worked, scary though it was at times. It has to be a drilled game plan that you switch into, not an instinctive panic manoeuvre. It sounds to me, having not seen the game, that we did the latter today, that we defended the edge of the box late on but without any of the organisation that's required to play that way.

And then the inevitable happened when a club like us in our position gets into a situation like that - sod's law kicks in, and having not had a shot on target for 82 minutes, momentum is with them and everything they hit suddenly flies in.

My lad also said that Iroegbunam was knackered late on. So I have to query Dyche for only making three late subs and leaving a key midfielder on the field when apparently his legs were shot. If that's accurate (and I stress that I didn't see the game so I'm speculating blind here) then that's another black mark against Dyche as far as I'm concerned. Basic game management.

Often after a game like that, the manager will come out and say that you can't legislate or prepare for individual errors. But I'm not aware of any individual errors leading to their three goals. It just sounds like we collapsed, and a manager like Dyche who sets out from the start to be disciplined defensively has to take the rap for that. We were Game of the Day on Sky and I tried to force myself to watch it, just so I could see for myself what the fuck happened, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

And I don't need to. Nobody should lose from 2-0 up in the 87th minute. I might make an allowance for if you're playing City, say, but not fucking Bournemouth at home.

Dyche had a lot of credit in the bank as far as I was concerned at the start of the season. After 3 games he's squandered all of it. While I'm not necessarily calling for him to go (not least because he's exactly the right bloke to get us out of the shit he's put us in, which is a mindfuck scenario in and of itself) I now wouldn't give a toss if he went.

One other thing - all that talk about not wanting to go down because we don't want to be playing Plymouth or QPR at home first game in the new stadium? Well fuck all that, I no longer give a shit. This is awful and interminable, what we're going through. We're the ultimate Premier League placeholder, desperately scrambling to survive year after year. I'm thinking right now that I don't care if we go down, it might be a release, it might be the basis of a new dawn and all that, but it might mean we win more than one game a month on average, it just might be a bit more enjoyable on a Saturday afternoon.

We absolutely deserve to go down, we're a fucking shambles. I used to think that relegation would be almost too embarrassing to bear, for a club our size, but where we are right now is embarrassing enough. I'm not sure relegation can be any more humiliating than what we're having to put up with right now.

hairy cataract wrote:Watching the end of the game again, what makes me sad - and angry - is that Tim and Gana, who had both played brilliantly, were knackered and had switched off for at least two of the three goals.  Tim was particularly brilliant but has tended to fade towards the end of games so far - he's possibly not fully up to the pace of the PL yet.  I'm sad because they didn't deserve to feel shit after the game, and I'm angry because Dyche should have seen they were fucked and replaced them with Garner and either Armstrong or Doucoure.  Instead he pulled Ndiaye and DCL, both of whom looked full of running still.  He could also have noticed that McNeil and Coleman were running out of steam, and replaced him with Lundstrom and Dixon, but nope.

The players fucked up, but perhaps the bigger fuck up came from Dyche, who should have seen what was happening - if not before, then certainly after Bournemouth pulled one back.

I'm fucking traumatised by today but imagine how those players feel.  

How the fuck can you watch it again? I can't watch it at all.

Went to the bookies first thing this morning to collect some weekend winnings. While I'm queueing, the bookie announces to a fellow punter that Dyche has been sacked. "I don't know anything about that" I interjected, informing them both that I'm an Evertonian, which induced a wince from the fellow punter (Forest fan) on my behalf.

"Yeah well I just saw something about it on the internet" retorted the bookie. Clearly bollocks, I couldn't see anything when I googled, but bookies are supposed to be in the know, aren't they? So I've spent all day wondering if an announcement was going to be made out of the blue.

I'll chastise the bookie for his duff info next time I'm in there - our headfuck is bad enough without this sort of nonsense. But here's the thing - when I first heard him say it, I did an almost involuntary fist-pump. So having suggested that I don't care whether he stays or goes, perhaps this is an indication that deep down I want Dyche out.