A potentially bright new dawn may be in the offing with Everton’s new ownership but, on the pitch at least, it’s going to take some time to take shape and while last season’s effective points haul of 48 — 12 points more than today’s opponents who, incredibly, went second in the Premier League with this result — offered genuine hope and evidence that the final season at Goodison Park wasn’t going to involve a battle to avoid relegation, the reality is turning about to be different.

For all the credit Sean Dyche has accrued for initially keeping Everton up by the skin of their teeth last year and then navigating the trials of last season’s points-deduction chaos, without he or Kevin Thelwell being able to meaningfully recruit to improve the Club’s ability to compete and start looking upwards rather than over their shoulder, it’s been spent by the manager’s inability to earn the currency that underpins football and would keep him in the job: winning matches.

With more composure from his players, he might well have recorded an unexpected win over either Chelsea or Manchester City this month, but the fact remains that he appears lost as to how to get this current squad scoring. Since the start of November, Everton have played nine games and scored in only two of them. Of the five goals they have managed, four came in one fixture and two were scored by Craig Dawson. However you dress them up in terms of austerity in the transfer market and the need to sell our best players on, the statistics are damning.

For Dyche, it was unfortunate that perhaps one of the biggest indictment of his limitations as a manager was standing in the opposite technical area today and for Everton and outgoing majority shareholder, Farhad Moshiri, it was painfully ironic that Nuno Espírito Santo has Nottingham Forest currently on course for surprise qualification for Europe given that he very nearly became the Toffees’ boss in June 2021.

Little about Santo appeared all that exciting on the back of Carlo Ancelotti’s short tenure and the Portuguese’s struggles at Tottenham but the turnaround in Forest’s fortunes he has brought about — not just stability but a genuine transformation — is remarkable. The East Midlanders may well end up falling away in a manner akin to Everton under Ancelotti when the faded from second place on Boxing Day to a disappointing 10th-place finish but, for now, he has his charges playing to their strength and riding a way of confidence.

The opposite is true at Goodison Park where Dyche was unable to build on successive draws against three of the teams that began the month occupying the top four. Those performances were laudable for their defensive resilience and, we hoped, would provide a platform from which to start winning matches but today’s opponents were equally impressive at the back and had the cutting edge at the other end that Everton sorely lack.

The cameos off the bench from Armando Broja against the Gunners and at City offered hope — there’s that word again — that he could add something different up top, maybe even some potency, and that part of Everton’s goalscoring problems are down to Dominic Calvert-Lewin and the muddiness of his contract situation.

Broja is a different profile of forward to Calvert-Lewin but similar enough in terms of physical strength for Dyche to hand him his first start as a Toffee. Unfortunately, he really only had one true sight of goal with his striking foot and missed the target with a couple of difficult headed opportunities.

Instead, the best chance fell to Iliman Ndiaye just five minutes in. The Senegalese effected a wonderful touch to take him past Nikola Milenković but having jinked his way to the edge of the box, his finish was wild and cleared the Park End crossbar by a considerable distance. And, sadly, it was symptomatic of a general lack of composure in Everton’s play in the early going, not helped by another exhibition, this time from Tony Harrington, of how low the standards of refereeing have sunk in the Premier League.

On balance, the officials seemed to tip every 50/50 decision Forest’s way but the hosts should probably be thankful that having booked James Tarkowski for a borderline decision after just eight minutes, Harrington didn’t show the defender a second for a worse infringement on the stroke of half-time. After looking back to his best against Chelsea, the team captain’s form and decision-making continues is once again a cause for concern.

Ultimately, Santo’s men didn’t need the referee. They travelled as the form team in the division, having taken the lead 14 times this season and they executed their game-plan to perfection. Chris Wood, enjoying as fruitful a season as any in his top-flight career in England, sounded a warning in the 11th minute when he chested down and volleyed wide after Jack Harrison gave the ball away and then glanced Anthony Elanga’s cross narrowly past the far post a couple of minutes later.

And if proof of the contrast in effectiveness between two teams built to try and capitalise on moments in transition it came after a quarter of an hour when Ndiaye ran down a blind alley at one end while, at the other, Wood managed to get his chest on a ball over the top from Morgan Gibbs-White that Elanga nodded back into his path and with Jordan Pickford having gambled on closing down the angle, the striker lobbed it over the keeper’s despairing glove and into the Gwladys Street net.

Everton had some half chances between then and the interval. Jarrad Branthwaite probably should have done better than miscue a header off a free-kick and Broja saw one header fall wide from Vitalii Mykolenko’s cross and another drop onto the roof of the net from the Ukrainian’s centre before he flashed a left-footer a yard wide of Matz Sels’ right-hand post.

Yet Dyche could have been delivering his half-time team talk at 2-0 down had Ramon Sosa done better in first-half stoppage time when he was played in by Forest’s star man, Gibbs-White, but he lashed his effort wide.

If the decision to once again deploy the horribly out-of-form Harrison wide on the right for a fourth successive game had seemed ill-advised, Dyche was at least moved to make an uncharacteristically early change at the halfway stage when the threw Jesper Lindstrøm on his fellow loanee’s place.

The Dane has yet to convince that he can make the grade in England but he does seem to offer more going forward than Harrison and after Gibbs-White had driven into Everton’s half but then made a mess of his finish, Lindstrøm had a sighter of his own after 57 minutes but couldn’t get the bend on his shot to bring it back on target. Three minutes after that, it was game over.

Dropping back to retrieve Branthwaite’s defensive header, Abdoulaye Doucouré sold Mykolenko short with a pass backwards that fell between Tarkowski and the left-back, with neither taking responsibility for it. Elanga gratefully stepped into the breach and found Wood lurking just outside the box and when the Kiwi spotted Gibbs-White waving in space on the other side of the area, he picked him out perfectly, allowing the former Wolves man to turn inside Doucouré and despatch his shot past Pickford to make it 2-0.

It almost got worse before Dyche made the first of his attack-minded changes aimed at somehow trying to retrieve a dire situation when Pickford spilled Sosa’s powerful shot but did superbly to charge down the rebound and then divert the third shot with an out-stretched glove.

If there was a positive to be gleaned from the final quarter of the contest it came in the form of Nathan Patterson’s performance off the bench. Dyche may reputedly have misgivings about the Scot’s defensive prowess but there is no question that he provides a good deal more attacking thrust than the likes of Ashley Young and Mykolenko on the other side.

Patterson, on for the 39-year-old in a double change that saw Idrissa Gueye make way for Calvert-Lewin and a two-man strike force, won the 71st-minute corner that Lindstrøm wasted by failing to beat the first man but it was his low cross that Orel Mangala almost fired inside Sels’ near post but, unfortunately, it skidded the wrong side of the upright.

Then, after Beto was thrown on in place of Broja, the last 15 minutes were largely an exercise in desperation for Everton. Lindstrøm belted a direct free-kick off the defensive wall, Ndiaye volleyed Calvert-Lewin’s knockdown off target before the striker planted a Mykolenko cross into the ‘keeper’s arms and then glanced Lindstrøm’s centre wide. And Beto finally forced a save worthy of the name from Sels with an instinctive header off Branthwaite’s delivery from the left, the Belgian pushing his shot away with both hands.

Forest, having won the game playing on the break while being solid at the back almost completed Everton’s misery on one final counter-attack in the 90th minute but Pickford was on hand once more to make a double-save to deny Elanga and then Taiwo Awoniyi.

If the return from the last four games had been reversed — i.e. Everton had lost against Arsenal, Chelsea and City but beaten Forest — Evertonians would probably be going into 2025 with more optimism about the Club’s prospects on the pitch than they probably are. The Friedkin Group’s nascent reign will eventually provide more clarity in terms of transfer policy, hopefully in the next four weeks of the winter window, but what they can and will do in terms of recruitment is an unknown at this point.

More results like this, however, and the urgency will be very much on the managerial situation. Everton managed just eight Premier League wins in 2024 and they will finish the year as the lowest scoring team of all 92 in the top four divisions. Defensively, Dyche has shown he can motivate his charges to remain compact, disciplined and frustrate the so-called top teams of the Premier League but in situations where the Blues are expected to — or at least have a greater chance to — beat an opponent at Goodison Park when the onus of possession and controlling the match is on them, he is found desperately wanting.

Things don’t get any easier to start the New Year. A trip to Bournemouth, where no Everton side has ever won in the League and then home fixtures against Aston Villa and Tottenham loom before a trip to the south coast to face Brighton. If it feels like salvation lies more in the transfer market than in Dyche’s ability to get his impotent attack firing or in rolling the dice on a new manager entirely then it’s no surprise. The Blues just keep finding themselves desperately treading water, hoping that three other teams will drown before they do.


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