The Table Doesn’t Lie: Everton aren’t this bad

Everton were thrashed by goal-shy Southampton this weekend, while Brighton impressed in defeat against Manchester United.

20. Crystal Palace (preseason prediction: 11th, difference: -9)
19. Swansea (17th, -2)
18. West Ham (10th, -8)
17. West Brom (12th, -5)
16. Everton (7th, -9)
15. Stoke (16th, +1)
14. Newcastle (14th, –)
13. Bournemouth (8th, -5)
12. Leicester (15th, +3)
11. Huddersfield (18th, +7)

For a club whose every performance these days seems to send them tumbling deeper into crisis, Everton might take some solace from the fact they’re only four points away from the top half of the table. Apparently no team has ever conceded so many goals through the first 13 games of the season and not been relegated. Happily for the Toffees, the Premier League has never been so thick with sub-mediocrity — for all its faults, the league as currently constructed will give a team, even one as bad as this, plenty of second chances.

This isn’t to defend David Unsworth’s side. They were awful against Southampton on Sunday, conceding four to a team whose defining feature is their inability to score goals, just as they were awful against Atalanta in midweek, losing 5-1 to a side currently in 12th place in Serie A, and just as they were awful against Crystal Palace and Lyon and Leicester before that. The only games in which they haven’t been entirely awful under Unsworth were against Chelsea, when they lost anyway, and Watford, when a missed penalty gifted them three points. Everton, as their performances suggest, are just simply awful.

Still, criticizing Unsworth feels somewhat beside the point. The former under-23 manager is out of his depth, but that makes sense considering he had no senior managerial experience before taking over at one of the biggest clubs in England, a badly constructed team stuck in the relegation zone with a fanbase whose preseason optimism turned sour quickly after it became apparent they had failed to adequately replace Romelu Lukaku despite spending well over $100 million in the transfer market.

Unsworth’s done a bad job, but if Everton’s board thought he was going to do a good job they would have hired him on a permanent basis. The problem is not that he’s underperformed, it’s that he’s been allowed to underperform for as long as he has by a board who failed to identify a suitable, available replacement before making the decision to fire Ronald Koeman, who wasn’t doing well, admittedly, but also had the misfortune of playing Manchester City, Chelsea, Tottenham, Manchester United and Arsenal in the first nine league games of the season.

With so much going wrong, it has become increasingly popular to suggest Everton’s problems stem primarily from their failure to reconfigure the squad following Lukaku’s departure. There is a sense that any manager, let alone one with as little experience as Unsworth, would struggle to turn this collection of players into a team capable of finishing in the top half. Certainly there are problems, the lack of a reliable center-forward chief among them, but there is also a lot of talent.

This same squad, plus Lukaku, conceded 44 goals last season, tied with Arsenal for the sixth best record in the league. They’ve missed Seamus Coleman perhaps, and Leighton Baines isn’t what he used to be, but he hasn’t been what he used to for at least two seasons. Ashley Williams has lost his edge, but Phil Jagielka remains the same intelligent, effective defender he’s been throughout his 30s, and Michael Keane, his new partner, was excellent last season. Also, Jordan Pickford is an upgrade on Maarten Stekelenburg.

Add to that Morgan Schneiderlin and Idrissa Gueye, who have both been good holding midfielders for top-half teams in the recent past, and Tom Davies, whose role at this point in his career may consist mostly of running around a lot and generally being a nuisance but is a role he plays quite well. Lukaku’s departure doesn’t explain how all these proven Premier League players have gone from conceding 1.16 goals a game last season to 2.15 this season. They’re playing badly, but they didn’t suddenly become bad.

As for the attack, it has lost its focal point in Lukaku, and has been further undermined by injuries to Ross Barkley and Yannick Bolasie, whose pace and skill out wide are Everton’s biggest needs outside of a reliable goalscorer. But again, there’s talent. Gylfi Sigurdsson scored nine goals and added 13 assists for a bad Swansea team last season. Wayne Rooney, even at this age, is a capable Premier League player, and was once upon a time a prolific center-forward.

Kevin Mirallas and Aaron Lennon, who started out wide against Southampton, are not the most fearsome pair of wingers in the Premier League, but they offer pace and width, two things the side lacked when Koeman was still trying to shoehorn his smorgasbord of attacking midfielders into the same starting XI. Davy Klaassen and Sandro Ramirez’s 2016-17 seasons really did happen. Oumar Niasse is also apparently a professional player and not the worst person in the entire world, as his former manager seemed to think.

This isn’t an especially inspiring array of talent, but several Premier League teams are doing a lot more with a lot less. Everton need a manager, they need the board to admit their culpability for the team’s current predicament and to learn from their mistakes, and they need what is an experienced squad of players to take more responsibility for their performances. What they don’t need is to believe their recent performances are an accurate reflection of the talent in what is an imbalanced, but not irreparably flawed, squad.

10. Southampton (9th, -1)
9. Brighton (20th, +11)
8. Watford (13th, +5)
7. Burnley (19th, +12)
6. Liverpool (3rd, -3)
5. Tottenham (4th, -1)
4. Arsenal (6th, +2)
3. Chelsea (5th, +2)
2. Manchester United (2nd, –)
1. Manchester City (1st, –)

With respect to Burnley, Brighton have been the most pleasant surprise of the season so far. They were excellent in defeat against Manchester United on Saturday, defending well and, particularly in the first half, flashing a not inconsiderable threat on the break, and lost 1-0 only after Ashley Young’s 66th-minute strike took a big deflection off Lewis Dunk before looping over Matt Ryan and in at the back post

Their success has had much to do with the performances of Pascal Gross, who is making a strong case for being the signing of the season so far. The German cost $3.6 million from Ingolstadt in the summer, and has either scored or assisted eight of Brighton’s 13 league goals. The Seagulls are currently in ninth place on 16 points, six points clear of the relegation zone they were expected to spend much of the season in.

Chris Hughton’s formula is simple enough — defend deep and look to hurt teams on the break — but it has been given another dimension thanks to Gross, the one Seagulls player capable of consistently ensuring their counter-attacks don’t end after one pass. Once Brighton establish possession, they also look to Gross, whose ability to deliver high quality crosses with both feet is supplemented by the best Cruyff turn in the Premier League this side of Adam Lallana.

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Excellent as Gross is, he’s not all Brighton have going for them, which is just as well given the likelihood he moves somewhere bigger and better after this season. Glen Murray is not the player you think he is, and Anthony Knockaert is, in the most endearing way possible, while Dunk and Shane Duffy have formed one of the best center-back pairings in the league outside the top six.

Knockaert’s questionable defensive instincts in front of Bruno, the most entertaining left-back in the league, looked like they might be a big weakness in the Seagulls’ defense, but the Frenchman makes up for it with his sheer irrepressibility. No matter how many tackles he misses, no matter how many players he fails to take on, he will keep running, up and down, up and down, until Hughton takes him off. If Gross is the brains of this team, Duffy and Dunk the brawn, then Knockaert is the heart.

There is a long way to go, and Brighton may well slip into the relegation battle, but so far they’ve been an example of what is possible on a limited budget, with a team comprised largely of Championship players, an example to teams small and big, like Everton, who have much less right to complain about the quality at their disposal.