It’s a script so worn and dog-eared that it’s a wonder the pages still hold together but Evertonians know it by sickened and weary heart. The manager makes a raft of changes to his strongest available side in the early rounds of the League Cup, gets "rewarded" with a horrendously disjointed and ineffective performance, throws on his better players late on to desperately salvage the tie, but the Blues get knocked out anyway.
A competition that should have been placed alongside the other two domestic trophies in terms of importance gets consigned to history for another 12 months and the 30-year yearning for silverware drags on a little longer. It’s okay, though — the players who don’t take to the pitch for another 6 days will presumably be raring to go when another crisis club, West Ham, rock up to Bramley-Moore Dock in search of a helping hand.
The rationale for David Moyes’s approach to this Carabao Cup Third Round tie against Wolves at Molineux is sound enough to the uninitiated. Away from the pressure of the club’s bread and butter, the Premier League, a cup tie offers the manager a chance to provide minutes to fringe players and imbed new recruits signed late in the transfer window. And, against a team that had lost all five of its first league games this season, the expectation is that there should be enough depth there to get the job done.
Unfortunately, reshuffling a team that had made a decent start to 2025/26, enough to be sitting in 10th place with back-to-back home games on the horizon, to the degree that Moyes did just disrupts any momentum and flow that has been established. And it’s not like there isn’t a sorry 11-year history from the Scot’s first spell as the Toffees’ boss and the record of practically every one of his predecessors to starkly illustrate the point. In theory it should be fine; at Everton, it almost never is.
If you’ve followed this club for the past 20-odd years, you knew precisely how this evening would play out. It was as “Everton, that” (a phrase we hoped we’d banished with the move to the waterfront) as it gets, right down to Tolu Arokodare scoring his first goal in struggling Wolves’s colours.
Despite the next game not being until Monday evening, Moyes made seven changes to the sides that had started against Aston Villa and Liverpool in Everton’s previous two outings. Jordan Pickford was given the night off as Mark Travers deputised, young left-back Adam Aznou was left on the bench as Seamus Coleman was deployed as the square peg in the round hole in place of Vitalii Mykolenko, while Tim Iroegbunam, Dwight McNeil, Charly Alcaraz and Thierno Barry came in for Idrissa Gueye, Iliman Ndiaye, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and Beto. Tyler Dibling was given his long-awaited full debut with Jack Grealish also named among the substitutes.
What followed was a ponderous first half during which both teams took turns in enjoying long spells of unproductive possession and which was punctuated by a sloppily-conceded goal for the hosts that set this tie on its depressingly familiar course.
Dibling and Michael Keane had gone closer than anyone to finding an opening goal before Wolves eventually did just before the half-hour mark. In a rare passage of incisive play from the visitors, Coleman found Alcaraz who, in turn, played the young winger in but he lashed wide with his weaker right foot from the angle.
Marshall Munetsi then headed a corner at the other end into Jake O’Brien before a long throw from the Irishman into the Wolves box picked out Keane and it took a finger-tipped save from Sam Johnstone to keep the header out.
However, when a deep cross into Everton’s own area wasn’t dealt with and Jhon Arias forced a parrying save from Travers, the ball fell to the completely unmarked Munetsi who fired home from close range.
Hwang Hee-Chen saw a shot deflected into the side-netting and Jørgen Strand Larsen prompted a one-handed stop from the Blues keeper as Vitor Pereira’s men looked the more likely to add to the scoreline before the interval.
Moyes’s response was not to make significant alterations at half-time even though his side’s horrendous demanded them. Barry and Alcaraz were replaced by Dewsbury-Hall and Beto but the painfully pedestrian McNeil somehow kept his place until the hour mark when he made way for Grealish and Dibling was swapped for Ndiaye.
Prior to that, the teams had traded wildly inaccurate shots from distance, André and Hwang lofting efforts into the stand behind Travers’s goal and Garner ballooning into the opposite end after Dewsbury-Hall had dithered uncharacteristically on a smart interception of one of Johnstone’s attempted passes to a defender.
Everton’s changes briefly brought a flurry of attacking intent, as Grealish set to work down the left flank and, constantly double-marked, drew a series of fouls. From one of them, Garner whipped a curling free-kick towards the top corner but his shot bounced agonisingly off the crossbar in the 72nd minute. Three minutes later, the midfielder drew a smart save from Johnstone with a placed, side-footed shot after the defence had opened up in front of him just outside the box.
What fire Everton were able to generate petered out pretty quickly, however. Perhaps guilty of too much selfishness, Ndiaye went on a mazy run past three gold shirts but, stretching for the ball at the last, he fired well off target.
And with two minutes left of the 90, Wolves killed the tie. Garner’s pitiful attempt to bring the ball down in the centre-circle saw him dispossessed and when João Gomes threaded it through to substitute Arokodare who drew Travers and then deftly chipped over him into the empty net.
Keane had one last flicked chance that Johnstone comfortably gathered in stoppage time but the game was already lost from Everton’s perspective. There’s a strong argument to suggest that was the case before a ball was kicked based on Moyes’s team selection.
And so the example set by Newcastle and Crystal Palace last season — of giving the cup competitions and the respect and attention they deserve — went ignored despite the manager’s emphatic claims that Everton were targeting deep cup runs as a priority this season.
Striking the balance between putting out a competitive team and giving minutes to players who haven'e enjoyed as many as they'd like isn't an easy one but, again, there is enough history now at Everton to suggest that Moyes should have erred on continuity — perhaps only selected the likes of Dibling and Barry from the off and then added other fringe players later once if the game looked like it was won.
Now, one route to Europe and an end to the trophy drought is closed off and, worse, much of that early season optimism engendered by Grealish and three wins from the first six matches has dissipated.
Monday’s clash with the Hammers now takes on added significance. Moyes will need to produce a response. Most Evertonians, meanwhile, will watch the rest of the Carabao Cup unfold with a heavy sense of disappointment; for the others, righteous anger because avoidable results like this are a maddening annual ordeal.