Everton and Lampard are out of road but Evertonian inertia runs deeper

Nothing is changing at Everton. The team isn’t improving, there seem to be no signs of any new players arriving, and the owner & manager seem paralysed.

Perhaps this will turn out to be the weekend when Frank Lampard ran out of road with Everton.

Defeat at West Ham United, not a team that have been setting the Premier League alight this season themselves, is their sixth in their last seven matches and with no visible improvement in the team’s performances on the horizon the most urgent question surrounding Goodison Park after such a pallid showing is surely now for how much longer this can be tolerated.

Everton increasingly seem to be acting as though they’re in the grip of some form of sporting paralysis. The team are not improving. Results are not improving. No money has been spent in the transfer market trying to improve this state of affairs. The manager, who just isn’t improving the team in any significant way, is still in his position. Nothing seems to be changing at Everton, and their results over the last three months have been proof in themselves that this is a club at which a lot of things need to change, and very urgently. 

Every time Everton play, there’s the same old cycle playing out in front of you again. The same players performing the same pas de deux on tranquillisers. And this is why the fans are so angry. Everybody knows that there are 20 teams in the Premier League, and that relegation will befall three of them come the end of the season. But when the gaps are obvious and nothing is apparently being done about anything, and when the club has been playing at this level for almost seven decades, when the middle-aged and older can still remember them being the champions of England, then the rawness of the affrontery is both understandable and inevitable. 

None of this is to condone those who surrounded their players in the car park after last weekend’s home defeat to Southampton, of course. But the protests of last weekend did seem to represent a turning point in the feeling of hopelessness that has descended over their season and of the air of toxicity hanging over the club, a stench that has become increasingly noticeable over the course of this season. 

With the fact that there would be protests already common knowledge, the club issued a statement prior to that match saying that club directors would be staying away from Goodison Park from the match on security grounds. Merseyside Police subsequently issued a…