Chelsea, Fitness and Young Boys – An Eclectic Everton Update

Well it’s been nearly a week since that Everton game. In a way it’s a good thing that we didn’t have a game last weekend as Twitter suggested to me that a lot of our fans needed to just leave football alone and go shopping or something. Clear your mind.At the end of the day we played quite well at times, defended well, etc, and we were unlucky that Chelsea nicked a late goal in what was the most Everton moment of the season so far. Player sent off late on? Check. Opposition player not sent off when he probably should be? Check. Late goal conceded? Yep.

My initial response to their goal was what a good strike it was, and that hasn’t really changed. Yes, Howard should have punched the ball further away. Yes, two players seemed to move their legs out of the way as it came back from William. These things happen though.

I was more bothered about Rom “I hope to play for a bigger club one day” Lukaku not blasting the ball into the back of the net from 5 yards out to put us into the lead after an hour. People say Cech save it really well. He dived and it hit him. He shouldn’t have had the opportunity to get in the way in my opinion. I know, I know, he’s young, but you can’t keep on making excuses for chances being scuffed like that. He’s actually the right age to get into those spaces and fire home!

As we saw more late points go south it reminded me of the quote I saw last weekend from Harry Kane of Spurs – a team who are nicking late wins pretty much every week. I said at the start of the season that we weren’t working hard enough and weren’t taking pre-season seriously enough. This is what he has to say:

“We had a great pre-season,” Harry Kane said when asked of the reason for such a record. “As the season has gone on we’ve got fitter and fitter. We’ve got better and I think that showed again. We looked stronger and I think we can keep that going for as long as possible. I feel fitter. I feel the fittest I’ve ever felt.”

In late-July, Christian Eriksen also remarked on the commitment demanded from Pochettino. “It’s been a hard pre-season,” he said. “We’ve been getting closer to where we want to be when the season starts. It is pretty hard. The first few weeks there were times when we went to bed pretty early. There have been double sessions two times a week when we were training at 10 o’ clock and then again at 4, so it’s a long day. Mentally as well it’s pretty hard but it’s fun to play football, so it’s alright.”

I really hope that we get back to the level of fitness we expect the team to have. We’ll need it as we head towards the end of the season. Hopefully we’ll have a few Europa League games to come.

Everton take on Young Boys of Bern on Thursday at 6pm our time. This won’t be an easy game, although saying that we have beaten better teams away from home in Wolfsburg for example.

Young Boys are second in their league so no mugs and have won 7 home games in a row in Europe and have some very good players but we really should have enough to put them away. Saying that I tend to say that most weeks against our opponents so there you go! I think we’d be happy with a draw, and we might even need to settle for a slight defeat and take our chances in the return game at Goodison.

We should have a full squad to pick from apart from those out longer term, and the good news announced today was that Leon Osman is making a comeback for the Reserves so it’ll be good to have him around as an option for Martinez going forwards. You tend to think he was quite important to the team last season based on performances recently!!

Related