Winter of discontent setting in as Everton again show naivety and impotence…

Everton lost at the very last to Wolves, which is what happens when you’re at toxic combination of defensively soft-centred and incapable in front of goal…

If there’s been one feeling that has been pretty much universal as the Premier League hoved into view again after the end of the World Cup, it’s been a sense that we’d all forgotten what had been going on in the league beforehand. It’s been a little over six weeks since Everton were booed from the pitch at Bournemouth following a performance as lacklustre as anything that has been seen from them in the last couple of years or so.

It took Everton supporters 90 Boxing Day minutes to remember exactly where they were up to before this particular interregnum. An afternoon which began with an appropriate level of seasonal optimism ended with a familiar level of booing and derision after a stoppage-time goal from Rayan Ait-Nouri gifted all three points to the Wolverhampton Wanderers team that had started the day at the very bottom of the Premier League pile.

Seven minutes in at Goodison Park, there was a feeling that perhaps this potential booby trap of a game might swing their way after all. A corner from the right-hand side saw Yerry Mina escape his marker and head down into the corner of the goal. On the touchline, Frank Lampard punched their air with the relieved facial expression of a man whose seen his life flash before his eyes several times over while the World Cup played out.

But Everton didn’t just fail to take advantage of that early lead. They allowed themselves to be pegged back to an equaliser from Daniel Podence midway through the first half and then huffed and puffed for a full 70 minutes without creating anything much of note and then found themselves getting mugged four minutes into stoppage-time when Adama Traore’s deflected cross fell kindly for Ait-Nouri, who scrambled the ball in from close range at the far post to complete a successful smash and grab raid from the Black Country.

This is now the second time in the last three months that Everton have lost three successive matches in the Premier League, but the portents look considerably gloomier than they did the last time this happened. When this happened before in October, those three defeats came against Newcastle United, Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United, three games from which they may not have expected to take very much at all.

But this is different. Everton’s last three Premier League defeats have now…