Abdoulaye Doucoure scored again before Lewis Dobbin grabbed his first goal for Everton as Sean Dyche’s side pulled further away from the relegation zone with a 2-0 win over a blunt Chelsea side at Goodison Park.
Doucoure is relishing his attacking role under Dyche and followed up his finish in Thursday’s win over Newcastle with another close-range conversion on Sunday, after Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s shot was parried by Robert Sanchez. That’s six for the season now for the Malian, his best total in Everton colours.
But an even bigger celebration was had in stoppage time when 20-year-old academy graduate Dobbin sealed the win by drilling in a loose ball from a corner.
Chelsea had piled on the pressure in search of an equaliser but the excellent Vitaliy Mykolenko smiled with relish as Everton repeatedly saw off the attacks and Goodison roared at the final whistle which sealed a third Premier League win in a row.
Everton stay 17th but they’re now four points clear of the relegation zone – the same gap they’d have on a listless Chelsea had they not suffered their points deduction.
Last weekend a combative win with 10 players over Brighton had seemed to signal a turning point for Mauricio Pochettino’s men but they were badly out of sorts in the final third here and, on the back of their midweek defeat at Manchester United, have slumped into the bottom half. Pochettino’s search for a solution to this expensively-assembled squad’s inconsistent form goes on.
Could the answer lie in more transfer window spending in January? “After the first half of the season, we need to check,” said Pochettino. “That is the reality. If we are not receiving enough, maybe we need to do some movement.
“That is the thing to analyse with the sporting director, to see if we can change this dynamic and improve in the second half of the season. We need to be more aggressive. Then it’s a massive assessment and when the transfer window opens, we will see what we can do.
“I don’t say if I am going to ask for more or less players. It’s to see if the perception matches the reality. We are missing something. We need to improve our reality.”
The visitors’ afternoon was made worse by a first-half injury to captain Reece James, who looks set to miss more game time with a hamstring problem, and a second-half injury to goalkeeper Robert Sanchez. But the lack of end product from the likes of Mykhailo Mudryk at the other end of the pitch remains just as big an issue.
SkySports
