If you’d managed to get an audience with Everton’s reclusive new owners, the Friedkins, and asked them what their hopes for the remainder of the 2024/25 season would be, it’s likely that incumbent manager Sean Dyche doing enough to ensure that the Toffees go into their new stadium in August as a Premier League club would have been high among them.

Of all the changes that will need to occur in the coming months, the one involving the head coach was surely one that TFG hoped they could punt on until the summer when it would be easier to hire the man they feel can take the Club forward. However, the evidence contained in a horrifying litany of attacking metrics is piling up suggesting that Dyche, who has managed to keep Everton in the top flight thus far by consistently going to the well of motivation and defensive organisation, appears to have lost the ability to do what he simply has to do enough times this season: win Premier League football matches.

His team have won just three of them in 19 attempts this season. Since the beginning of November, Everton have played 10 games and scored in just two of them. Two of the paltry five goals they have managed were scored by Craig Dawson, their No 9, Dominic Calvert-Lewin, hasn’t registered a goal since mid-September and their recognised centre-forwards have just three goals between them. Over the last five matches, Sean Dyche’s side have an average xG of 0.498 — that's pertinent because when it was much higher at the start of last season, he used it as a defence — and today, when “the Gaffer” needed a result to ease the pressure mounting on his shoulders, they couldn’t manage a single effort on target.

Setting aside the aberration at Old Trafford a month ago, Dyche has managed to shore up his defence and make the Blues hard to beat but striking the balance between defensive solidity and scoring enough goals to win matches has largely eluded the former Burnley boss, particularly now that Everton’s effectiveness from set-pieces has so alarmingly diminished in recent weeks. Unfortunately for him, simply drawing your way 0-0 to safety is a high-wire act you can’t really pull off at this level — not when the likes of Wolves, Crystal Palace and Ipswich boast sufficient attacking talent to amass enough points to send the Toffees down.

That’s the very real danger confronting Everton and their new owners and nothing about this depressing defeat to Bournemouth, who have now done the double over the Blues this season following that most damning of results at the end of August when Dyche watched paralysed on the sidelines as his charges threw away a 2-0 lead in nine devastating minutes, suggests that things will change soon.

Indeed, change isn’t a word readily associated with Dyche who, even with the admittedly significant challenges around recruiting for an already small and limited squad, hasn’t shown any ability to progress past the rudimentary tactics and strategies that were his hallmark at Turf Moor. There has been a building consensus among Everton’s supporters that neither he nor his staff are capable of instilling in this team an effective way of playing attacking football, the requisite intricacies and passing patterns that modern, top-flight football demands.

The result of this receding “muscle memory” of the team, as a collective, when they get into attacking areas is an inability to create genuine chances and a reliance on individuals like Iliman Ndiaye to produce sporadic moments of magic. That the Senegalese forward didn’t really touch the ball until a quarter of an hour of this contest has elapsed, however, spoke to a failure on Dyche’s part of finding a way to build his team around its most effective and dangerous attacking player.

He might have been encouraged by an opening that saw the Blues on top and the Cherries not mount their first meaningful attack until the eighth minute but there was nothing to show for it apart from an early Ashley Young corner that, predictably, came to nothing.

Instead, Everton might have conceded at the first opportunity when Dean Huijsen flicked on a long throw-in and Jordan Pickford had to be alert to pounce on Dango Outtara’s downward header. And, in a moment that prompted flashbacks to those harrowing last few minutes of the reverse fixture at Goodison Park, at Antoine Semenyo had the ball in the net a few minutes later off a wicked Ryan Christie cross but the Ghanaian was one of four red and black shirts clearly in an offside position as the ball was delivered.

Lacking composure, as is their custom these days, the visitors struggled to establish any forward momentum but Armando Broja, making his second start, offered a glimpse of what he can do with an excellent turn and run down the right flank that he ruined by overhitting his cross before crocking himself in the most annoying fashion in the 20th minute.

Having engineered space for a shot, the on-loan Chelsea striker kicked the turf before the ball and though he tried to hobble through the injury for a few more minutes, he was eventually replaced by Calvert-Lewin. And in a similarly tragi-comic moment shortly before half-time, Jesper Lindstrøm, who had been preferred to the woefully out-of-form Jack Harrison, connected with Calvert-Lewin on the follow-through from a wayward shot and he had to be withdrawn at half-time.

In between, Evanilson fired Bournemouth’s best chance to that point wide of goal following a corner while Pickford was forced to first bail out Orel Mangala after the Belgian had inexplicably presented a backwards pass to a Bournemouth player before brilliantly palming away Justin Kluivert’s attempted dink shot and then tackling Semenyo before the winger could convert the loose ball.

The England keeper was there again in first-half stoppage time to save Semenyo’s header and Huijsen dropped a header onto the roof of the net from a tight angle as Andoni Iraola’s men threatened to break the deadlock on the stroke of half-time.

Dyche admitted afterwards that the two changes he made at half-time that saw Patterson (who should have started following his positive cameo against Nottingham Forest on Sunday) replace Lindstrøm and Harrison Armstrong come on for Mangala were partly enforced and partly an effort to change things but it was mystifying why he chose to haul off the team’s most effective passer of the ball and leave the “rubber-shinned” (hat-tip @IanG1878) Doucouré on for the entire second half.

Patterson, while worryingly profligate with possession early in the second half before he settled down somewhat, did offer a bit more thrust down the right — why not deploy him at right-wing instead of Young? — and young Armstrong exhibited a good deal more composure and intelligence than many of his more senior team-mates but it didn’t translate into any real goalscoring chances.

Young wasted a free-kick after he himself had been felled trying to drive into the opposition penalty area and Jarrad Branthwaite could only steer an attempted cross into the side-netting off another set-piece but one of the best openings fell to Patterson. Unfortunately, the Scot went for glory rather than slipping a pass to his right for Young and ended up spooning his effort over the crossbar.

At the other end, meanwhile, Pickford did well to readjust his feet and tip Outtara’s skidding low shot past his post and watch substitute Enes Ünal glance a header off target but the winner came amid more slack defending from Everton at the crucial moment.

Milos Kerkez clipped an inviting cross to another sub, David Brooks who was left completely unmarked by Vitalii Mykolenko around 14 yards out and the Welshman delivered a crisp volley back across the keeper and past Branthwaite who, perhaps instinctively, ducked instead of trying to get his head on it to divert it over.

Mykolenko’s attempt to atone for another lapse was to balloon a shot high into the stand from distance while Brooks half-volleyed a yard or so wide from a similar position to his goal but had Doucouré managed to lash a late shot on target, Everton might well have left with a point. Instead, however, he swept wide.

Dyche has made mention at times during his tenure of his players’ inability to find the killer moment and execute when chances present themselves and it’s hard not to have sympathy for him on that score. Similarly when it comes to injuries that have robbed him of Dwight McNeil’s services for the best part of a month and two players today in Broja and Lindstrøm who he would surely have hoped might seize their chance to shine today.

“We’ve had so many draws but the run is still not really a bad on paper if you add wins in it, but we haven’t had wins,” Dyche awkwardly and damningly argued to the cameras in the tunnel after the game. The problem is that, fundamentally, Dyche appears to be completely out of ideas and, in a painfully ironic echo of his own words in April 2022 when remarking to his Burnley players that he didn’t think Frank Lampard’s Everton knew how to win a game, it’s hard to see where the next victory is coming from.

There is a cast-iron rule in football that you can’t win games if you don’t score and in order to score goals, you have to create chances and put the ball on target when you do to even have a hope of picking up points in this league. Worryingly, Everton under Dyche aren’t doing any of it anymore and gravity now pulling this Club back down towards the bottom three, his position has surely become untenable.


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