The Casualty

Over the course of these turbulent past five years in Everton’s history, Dominic Calvert-Lewin has been as prominent in the narrative as any player and, in many ways, his story is emblematic of the fleeting highs of Carlo Ancelotti’s only full season in charge of the Toffees and the struggles that followed as the Club fought successive battles to avoid relegation from the Premier League.

At the age of 23 and having taken the bold step of requesting the iconic No 9 jersey, Calvert-Lewin emerged under Ancelotti as the heir apparent to Romelu Lukaku, who had left for Manchester United three years previously without having been adequately replaced.

“DCL” scored 21 goals in all competitions in 2020/21 (surpassing Lukaku’s tally in each of the Belgian's last two seasons at Goodison Park) and deservedly broke into the England squad, even if his game-time at the delayed Euro2020 tournament was limited by the presence ahead of him of the likes of Harry Kane and Marcus Rashford.

As he describes to Jake Humphrey and Damian Hughes on the High Performance Podcast, Calvert-Lewin was on a high at that time and felt as though the sky was the limit. He was achieving his dreams and then, in his words, “the rug was pulled” from underneath him by a succession of injury problems that were triggered by a fractured toe sustained in August 2021.

In that sense, the Sheffield-born striker became a victim of the failings of Farhad Moshiri’s ownership of Everton. Ancelotti had jumped ship in May and, as the Premier League began to breathe down the Club’s neck regarding Profitability and Sustainability concerns, his successor, Rafael Benitez, was forced to deal with strict austerity in the market that limited the Blues to just £1.7m worth of transfer business that summer.

Cenk Tosun was on the books and Benitez had brought in Salomon Rondon on a free transfer but even with Richarlison there, the team were still heavily reliant on Calvert-Lewin for goals. He played the first three games of the 2021/22 Premier League campaign with pain-killing injections in his broken big toe but the change in his mechanics to compensate for that injury led to him tearing his quadriceps, which would sideline him for four months.

As he said to Humphrey and Hughes, “I wasn’t protected enough as a young lad just eager to play, eager to prove, eager to do. That set off a series of events where I had two seasons of on-and-off injures.”

He would manage only 15 starts that season but would return just in time to score the most important and easily the most memorable goal of his career — that dramatic winner against Crystal Palace that completed a stunning turnaround from Everton being 2–0 down and guaranteed the Toffees’ top-flight status.

Whereas Richarlison was able to recover despite also playing through the pain barrier and cortisone shots to help drag Everton over the line, Calvert-Lewin’s injury problems weren’t behind him. He suffered another soft-tissue problem just days before the 2022/23 season opener and though he returned to the starting lineup in October, he struggled to stay fit over the course of the season and, again, he only 15 made league starts, culminating at Molineux the following May and the familiar sight of the striker with his head in his hands after damaging his hamstring.

In terms of timing it was horrendous — Everton were in the throes of another desperate scrap for survival and there would be no DCL heroics in the final game against Bournemouth. That responsibility fell to Abdoulaye Doucouré and with Sean Dyche now at the helm, the decision was taken to send Calvert-Lewin away on a focused and individualised rehabilitation programme over the summer of 2023 aimed at getting him fit once and for all.

No longer would he be rushed back half-fit or barely fit and though the relationship between player and “Gaffer” would eventually sour, Calvert-Lewin had Dyche to thank for the fact that he played 38 times in all competitions in 2023/24 and 26 times in 2024/25 until he tore a hamstring this past January.

Not surprisingly, the stop-start nature of his career and the revolving door to the manager’s office at Finch Farm since he made his debut as a teenager under Ronald Koeman in 2016 has hugely impacted his time at Everton, his development and his goalscoring record.

Prior to emerging as the predator under Ancelotti, Dominic was known to many Evertonians as the striker who doesn’t score and, unfortunately, he has come full circle. Only under the Italian, when his instructions were to position himself between the posts and to focus on poaching goals rather than to run the channels, did he reach double figures for goals in a season. For the rest of the time Calvert-Lewin has either been on the treatment table or toiling up front for a struggling team fighting for its Premier League life and managed by the one-dimensional Dyche.

Under Dyche, his remit was to run, chase, harry and win aerial duals for a side that created relatively few goalscoring chances per game. And yet, whether or not it was due to a lack of continuity in his appearance record, it has to be acknowledged that Calvert-Lewin often didn’t do himself any favours when it came to taking the chances that did come his way.

For every towering header in the Goodison derby of April 2024 or consummate striker’s finish like his goal at Villa Park in a Carabao Cup victory in September 2023, there were glaring misses like in another one-on-one away at Villa, this time in the league this past season, where he had the chance to restore the Blues’ lead at 3-2 but he struck the crossbar instead. Or the chance at Newcastle on the final day of 2024/25 last month, perhaps his last goalscoring opportunity in an Everton shirt, where he was again clean through on goal but fired straight at the goalkeeper.

Now 28 and out of contract at Everton, Calvert-Lewin stands at a crossroads. The offer of a new deal from the Club sat unsigned last summer as he pursued a potential move elsewhere and when no serious takers emerged — a possible switch to Newcastle was never truly close to coming off — he elected to run his time at Goodison down.

It was something of a gamble, one that he lost to a degree in January when he suffered another hamstring problem in the away game at Brighton, just days after he had scored a potentially trajectory-changing goal against Tottenham in David Moyes’s second match in charge after replacing Dyche as manager. It meant that he missed the bulk of the second half of the campaign, only returning in the final few games, and even then largely as a substitute.

Should this summer mark the end of his road at Everton, as many suspect it will, it’s likely that Calvert-Lewin’s time as a Toffee will be framed in terms of “what might have been”. Possessing all the attributes to make him a quintessential English-style centre-forward — prodigious aerial ability, together with strength and power — he was, perhaps, missing just the ability to consistently finish (classy finishes against the likes of Sheffield Wednesday and Brighton in 2019 showed he had natural talent; he just hasn't shown it regularly enough). And, crucially, luck with injuries.

As he describes on High Performance, it has been a mentally and emotionally gruelling period for the striker. One moment, in particular, where the pressure he felt to be the saviour as the Blues’ No 9 at a time when he couldn’t play due to being sidelined proved too much and he hit rock bottom, alone on his 25th birthday. Just a few weeks later, he would score that iconic 85th-minute headed winner against Palace.

“That feeling, I’ll never be able to describe it. It was the weight of my own pressure, the football club. I am quite an emotional person so I put that responsibility on my shoulders. I thought: ‘It’s my responsibility to save everybody, save people’s jobs.’

“So when I scored that goal it was a relief. The biggest relief ever. On my birthday, which would have been 4/5 weeks before I scored that goal, that was a low point for me. I can’t remember why — I think it was built-up emotion — I ended up crying.

“I was on my own on my birthday, crying on my bedroom floor for whatever reason, feeling a little bit sorry for myself. I think it was not knowing how to express what I was feeling in that moment, that feeling things were getting away from me, feeling you have all the pressure of the football club on your shoulders and you just want to go out there and play.

“And at that moment I couldn’t play because I had picked up another injury and it was overwhelming. But I remember thinking to myself: ‘This is a rock bottom moment.’ In my mind I was thinking it doesn’t get worse than this, you need to pick yourself up and go again.”

More than once in the podcast, he explains that he has always had complete faith in his ability and he will need to draw on that faith in the next phase of his career if he can stay fit. His injury setbacks and recent scoring record — he has averaged 4.5 goals over the past four seasons — almost certainly mean that the days of being linked with Arsenal, as he was in the summer of 2021, are gone. More likely is a sideways move in England or, perhaps, a chance to try his hand on the Continent where there has in the past been interest in his services.

Wherever he goes, we Blues will surely watch with interest to see if the lad Everton picked up from Sheffield for a little more than a million pounds almost a decade ago can fulfil the potential he always seemed to have but couldn’t quite realise at Goodison for all the reasons describe here and if can find the success he craves.