07 October 2023 , 02:00
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It is barely five months ago that Sean Dyche, even amid the euphoria of Premier League survival, was delivering a brutal message about the changes required at Goodison.
They had escaped the ‘existential threat’’ of relegation by the slimmest of margins with a nerve-shredding 1-0 defeat of Bournemouth, with the manager insisting that the whole ethos of the club must change.
Cut to this season, and Bournemouth visit Goodison Park again, with seemingly very little movement around the proud Merseyside club in the intervening period. They appear to be in a relegation battle, and apparently with the owner Farhad Moshiri needing to borrow £20million from prospective new owners 777 Partners, just to survive a cash-flow crisis.
For Dyche much has changed within his squad, though little of it is visible. A new ethos is slowly creeping in, he says, but there is one major stumbling block: the acceptance of limited ambitions, and limited horizons.
The Blues boss calls it “low-level norms”, and explains that it is a sub-standard way of thinking, mired in past failures: “The whole club has – not got used to, but it has adapted to – low-level norms, and the team can get trapped into that.
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“What I was referencing at the end of last season is that we have to break through these barriers of low-level norms where it just becomes alrightness. [People think] ‘Oh it will be alright because it is kind of what Everton do, we kind of fight, we do a bit, we have a hot bit, then we drop back down’ and it just becomes a new norm. I have been talking to the players about breaking through these barriers.”
Dyche believes he is pushing through the barriers within his squad, and is gradually getting the fans on board – who have set higher standards and bigger demands for the team. But the humiliating home defeat by Luton showed there is still so much work to be done, and he freely admits that: “When you change that and get that winning feeling it becomes a constant and becomes a high-level norm.
Everton were beaten 2-1 by Luton at Goodison Park (Lewis Storey/Getty Images)“It is amazing how much you will fight for that, you will fight for that high-level norm. The opposite scenario – this club has had two seasons of sort of accepting alrightness. I must make clear I don’t mean the fans by the way, the club and the way it is and the team and the delivery – it has all been a bit, ‘we are a big club’ without big delivery.
“The model, the team, it has become a bit, ‘oh it will work.’ No, no it only works when we make it work. Then everything else works on that. I reaffirm that to the team all the time.”
Dyche wants to see that mentality against Bournemouth, and he wants a victory which will push his side away from the relegation zone. But he knows that transformation will take time.
He said: “Words are easy. Managers go into roles and people say, ‘oh the manager has to change the culture’ and they say it as if you just go: ‘da da’, flick a switch and everything changes. If it was that easy everyone would do it. It is not easy to get all noses pointing in the right direction and constantly pointing in the right direction through thick and thin. That’s what we must do.”
Meanwhile, in some positive news, young defender Jarrad Branthwaite has signed a new-four year contract with the club.