Everton stun Brighton with a five-star Bank Holiday trip to suddenly move towards safety

Everton have transformed their chances of avoiding relegation with a five-star, five-goal performance away to a shell-shocked Brighton & Hove Albion.

It has looked for several weeks as though the ultimate decision over who will get relegated from the Premier League would be which teams among the rabble would not actually be able to dig out a win, and Southampton. None of those still labouring near the bottom of the table with three or four games of the season can reasonably argue that they haven’t had a chance. The bottom five have won two out of their last combined 25 games. All a couple of them had to do was conjure something and they’d be looking as comfortable as West Ham and Wolves are right now.

But now Everton have raised the stakes with an extraordinary 5-1 win at Brighton, which changes the shape of the bottom of the Premier League while also raising the question of exactly where this has been hiding all season.

A year ago today, Everton were 16th with four games left and one point above the relegation places. They escaped with a match to spare, and as such it’s difficult not to want to tip a bucket of old water over Farhad Moshiri’s head and remind him that these nerve-shredding scraps are usually a manifestation of something going wrong behind the scenes rather than being some sort of design feature that you should aspire to each campaign.

But this is Everton that we’re talking about, and if football clubs do carry such a thing as DNA, theirs surely now contains “getting yourselves into an almighty pickle near the bottom of the table and then doing something extraordinary to get out of it”. We’ve talked at length on these pages about the teams near the bottom of the Premier League, looking for signs of life, of what they need to do to give themselves their best chance of avoiding that dreaded trapdoor. And with Everton, it was more difficult to see these signs than at most.

All three of their Premier League wins under Sean Dyche prior to their Bank Holiday Monday trip to Brighton had been 1-0, and the biggest problem Everton have had of late is that the last of these had come two and half months ago. Their previous match, a 2-2 draw at Leicester, seemed to betray all the insecurities that have left both teams looking so prone, from James Maddison’s dismal penalty to Dominic Calvert-Lewin missing an open goal from two yards out. They absolutely could not afford to be this wasteful again.

And it can hardly be said that…