Clean Sheet, Please!
The last few weeks have been pretty terrible ones to be an Everton fan - in fact, it has been pretty hard to even write about my beloved Toffees (hence, the silence). The draw against Aston Villa was a brief respite, but despite what I thought was a good performance, I always knew we would concede a goal.
And what a comedy goal it was. We got completely overloaded down our right but when the ball came into the box we had so many chances to get tight and prevent a shot at goal. Gabriel Agbonlahor eventually scuffing a shot that somehow got past a number of defenders, Howard parries it, yet it evades all our defenders to drop for big John Carew. Even then there is still a chance to prevent a goal but it flicks between Joseph Yobo's legs.
The three uses of coordinating conjunctions ('but' twice and 'yet' once) in that four sentence paragraph probably gives its own indication of the chances we had to clear. And that is the annoying things as for 89 minutes out of the 90 our defence looks solid. However, for one minute per game we always a lapse in concentration, leading to a panic and then we concede some woeful goal, full of defensive mishaps and excuses. Just look at Benfica's second on Thursday night. They get space; we lose composure and try to encircle the ball before it drops to an unmarked attacker. Agh!
It's strange as for the first time under David Moyes, I really believe that we have the capability to score goals. Out of the 18 games we have played in all competitions this season we have only failed to score in three. However, we have only managed to keep five clean sheets and this is the opposite of what we have come to expect. In previous seasons the battle was always to score but we defended with aplomb.
At the start of the week, I was assuring myself that pretty soon Phil Jagielka and Mikel Arteta would be back, and they would help shore things up. Jagielka to provide inspiration in defence and Arteta to give us composure in the centre of midfield when we just need someone to keep the ball - I've lost count of the number of times that we have clumsy surrendered possession on the halfway line. However, the two have now had injury set-backs that mean we won't be seeing them in blue for a while yet.
I continue to defend our attempts at attacking play, I think we continue to try and hold possession more with our full-backs pushing forward - although we have to look incisive on more occasions. For all the talk of us not managing to break Villa down last week, we did score first and should have gone on to win the game. What I can't defend is the back-four and there dreadful collapses in concentration; Moyes needs to put this right and soon.
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