Everton have started the season in the worst possible way, and will head into the international break without a win in the Premier League.
However, that’s almost acceptable, given how they started last campaign in similar fashion and still avoided the drop by some distance.
There’s still reason for so much hope, but it was the manner of Saturday’s defeat that really has fans losing faith.
2-0 up with three minutes of normal time to go, and in the end, supporters poured out of Goodison Park in their thousands, bemused as to how they had thrown it away to lose 3-2.
Naturally, Sean Dyche was the main reason to blame.
Graeme Bailey outlines Sean Dyche’s ‘main problem’
Having already provided an update on Sean Dyche’s Everton future, journalist Graeme Bailey once again spoke exclusively to Everton.News to provide an update on what exactly the board think is the 53-year-old’s biggest downfall.
After all, there have been plenty exhibited across his near two-year spell at Goodison Park, which have mostly been overlooked due to the stability he promises.
Bailey would simply tell us: ‘I am told that the main problem is that this Everton team are not playing like Dyche team, shipping goals at more than three a game so far this season.
The Toffees have conceded a mammoth ten goals in just three Premier League games this season.
Sean Dyche’s Everton substitutes fail him once again
For the position they are in, Dyche is undoubtedly the best manager that Everton could hope for.
He has experience in the Premier League batting way above his station on a shoestring budget and with a group of players that few around them rate.
Having taken the ownership situation in stride, alongside all the financial turmoil too, there are few head coaches on the planet who would have stuck with a club throughout such unrelenting misery.
And yet, despite all of this, it’s his substitutions which continue to let him down more than anything.
Most fans can excuse the negative tactics, seen as a necessary evil to keep them in the division.
What they can’t excuse is getting the simplest of decisions wrong at the crucial moments, whether it be to leave certain players on, or take the most important stars off.
On Saturday, Idrissa Gana Gueye, Tim Iroegbunam and Dwight McNeil were dead on their feet. It was leaving the backline woefully exposed, and something had to change.
So, he brought off Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Iliman Ndiaye, their two only attacking outlets, and replaced them with Abdoulaye Doucoure and Beto, two players notorious for their lack of control.
The players were pathetic in that eight-minute collapse, but it was Dyche’s substitutes that truly let them down.
