BOOM! TW@T! SH!T! etc.
Well that was fairly unexpected wasn’t it? After 90 minutes of watching Everton huff, puff, and in general not look anywhere near scoring a goal, Captain Jags (or ‘that useless *insert expletive here*’ as he’s been described in recent weeks) shellacked one from 30 yards into the top corner. Permission to go mental sir?
In truth I’m not really sure we deserved the point when watching the game back again – we weren’t terrible but they had the clearer chances with Balotelli having chances that he should really have done better with. One save from Howard off his shoulder/the bar from about 5 yards really should have been put away when it was 1-0. Still, who cares, eh?
Gareth Barry was certainly very lucky to still be on the pitch within about 20 minutes of the start. Booked after 90 minutes after a magnificent foul on Markovic, he followed that up by almost catching the ball in his own penalty area trying to stop a shot, and then he clearly tripped Balotelli. He’s meant to be experienced and clever isn’t he? And to think we were worried about Besic!
Other details – well, old Pancake-bothering fodless DJ-bating Derby-refereeing Gerrard opened the scoring with a free-kick that everyone saw coming apart from Howard, and Everton had chances through Baines (who knocked a great cross to Johnny X the invisible striker it appears) and Lukaku, who had a poor game again.
Lukaku appears to need some time to develop his game. His touch still isn’t good, and despite touching the ball 57 times he lost it on 22 of those occasions. He gives the ball away via bad passes a lot – it’s not just his poor touch which needs to improve.
Good things from the game? John Stones. Awesome. Why he has been dropped to right-back in some of our games is beyond me. He is our best centre-back and everyone else needs to compete to play with him. Hopefully the promising cameo from Ty Browning at right-back means that Martinez has stumbled across a decent backup for the much-missed Coleman now. I presume Distin had a knock but he should be a backup for us now and no more.
The other thing to mention is that Liverpool really were quite poor but were good enough to keep us at bay for a long, long time. Everton head to Krasnodar in Russia on Thursday in the Europa League before heading to Manchester United the following Sunday. An important week has started okay, but we could really do with two other good results to improve the confidence.