Everton today fell to their second league defeat in a row, victims of their own drowsy defending and a comically bad offside call.
After a dreadful start, which allowed Arsenal a quick run of shooting practice followed by a simple goal, they seemed jolted into action by the pure, uncut, boiled-down fury which was clearly pouring from David Moyes. This anger, perhaps combined with the goal that never stood (more on that in a minute), caused the game to settle into an unbroken rhythm of interesting moments which never really threatened much for either team.
Vermaelen’s goal was unusual in that Everton are usually good at defending corners- as any team which counts Cahill, Fellaini and Jelavic among its non-defenders should be. But it was part of a pattern of first-half defending in which the blues’s back line always seemed to have been taken over by events, arriving too late at the scenes of danger.
Drenthe’s disallowed goal was probably Everton’s best move of the match, with his well-timed run leaving him costless on the left side of the box to finish nicely. It seemed like one of those embarrassing situations in which a player is so unnaturally fast that either the linesman can only guess where he was at the time of the ball being played, or he just gets so far ahead of the line during the run that the linesman thinks that he must have been offside. Either way, it was hard luck for the enigmatic Dutchman, in whom David Moyes seems to have a lot of faith.
But the good move was a rarity, with Everton again struggling to convert possession in the first and second thirds into some kind of position in the final one. Any forward pass that wasn’t from Pienaar seemed speculative, and generally of low quality.
Where this leaves Jelavic in the long run is an interesting question. Tonight he showed signs of the kind of isolation that has plagued Everton’s frontmen since the turn of the millennium.
In ten years of Moyes’s reign, there has only been one season in which a striker has reached 15 goals. His aversion to playing two up top has left Everton with an alternation between energetic strikers who have to run the line, spending half their time chasing the ball down the wing (think Radzinski, Johnson, Beckford, Bent); and strikers who rely on physical strength and great (purportedly) natural abilities at the expense of mobility and so end up isolated on the edge of the box, with their backs to goal (think Yakubu, Saha, Jo, Beattie).
Obviously Wayne Rooney is something of an anomaly here. Despite his obvious status as a modern forward, his main handicap was that he was a dick who mostly cared about playing for England to get a one-way ticket away from Goodison.
The race to be blues’s top scorer for the season is currently a tie between Drenthe, Baines and Vellios (who’s still in the reserves) with three league goals each. That’s genuinely pitiful for any team, to say nothing of a team harbouring European ambitions.
Evertonians can only hope that Jelavic kicks on soon and into next season, and that there’s a cogent system to turn his undoubted abilities into regular goals.