The postponement of the Merseyside Derby allows me to look back at Everton’s 4-0 win over Wolverhampton Wanderers and the display of Ashley Young in particular who became the oldest scorer in the club’s history.
You need a special sort of dedication to still be playing in the Premier League at 39. Ashley has had his tough moments at the football club and he’s made silly mistakes, including getting sent off on the opening day of this season but since he’s come back into the side, he’s probably been our best player.
He’s got his head down and he does all the right things. Like Seamus Coleman, he’s a leader in the group, and he’s also very cute and clever in terms of how he goes about games.
If you’re under pressure, he’ll try and force the referee into a decision by drawing a foul. He knows all the tricks in the book, but he also gives it his all.
We probably didn’t expect this season for a 39-year-old right-back to be our best player, but it shows that his professionalism is absolutely spot-on and that should rub off, not just on all the youngsters at the football club, but some of the senior players too. Yes, you’re going to make mistakes – Ashley will be disappointed that it was his penalty that was saved when we were knocked out of the Carabao Cup by Southampton – but you’ve got to keep your standards high.
He’s experienced the highs and lows of football, and he knows how to bounce back and show the true professionalism of not giving up. At this advanced stage of his career, he could easily just think ‘well things are going against me,’ and hang up his boots, but he’s determined to keep going.
He’s showing that by playing a lot of minutes for the football club and not missing any training sessions. Ashley is old enough for his career to have overlapped with mine but I must admit, I don’t remember having any tussles with him, probably because he’d have probably been over on the other side of the pitch with him mostly playing left wing back then.
There’s no way I was going on the right. It only ever happened once, I was up against Marc Overmars, and I retired from playing right-back after that!
Playing the FA Cup third round tie at home to Peterborough on a Thursday night match under lights time schedule feels a strange one for everyone involved, but also a dream come true for Young who may share the field with his son, Tyler. Our fans are desperate for good cup run in our final year at Goodison so professional heads all-round will be needed to progress.
Young was rolling back the years with his free kick that opened the scoring against Wolves, but Orel Mangala, who netted his first goal for the club, just shaded him for man-of-the-match in my eyes.
Mangala has got that assurance in the centre of the park that we’ve been missing. The ball has seemed like something of a hot potato for a lot of our players, who give it away far too quickly with poor decision-making.
He has been having to get used to Premier League football again in terms of the speed and the strength required, but he looks like he’s found his feet now. He just seems to make the right decisions when he’s on the ball and he’s side on when he receives it, which you like to see from your midfield players, and he tries to choose the correct options.
It’s up to his team-mates further forward to make the right runs but he’s calm and assured, and he makes other players look better when you’ve got someone like that who can open his body up to make the moves that get us further up the pitch. Hopefully he can stay fit now because he’s probably our best footballing midfielder.
I’ve been quite surprised he’s been left out a couple of times but that might have been down to fitness or his energy levels. On the ball, it’s good to have a player like him though to calm everybody else down.
I thought Mangala’s composure in midfield at the right moments really helped us in terms of game management. Other key players were also back in form like James Tarkowski in the right place at the right time and Jordan Pickford doing what he needs to do when the game was still goalless.
Everton’s display against Wolverhampton Wanderers was a good reaction from the boys after the Manchester United game. For me though, there is still a lot of improvement that needs to happen to ensure we have a safer season.
Our in-play game needs to improve, including our possession on the ball. Wolves started lively, with one and two-touch play in the midfield that cut through us very easily, but what I really enjoyed was seeing Everton punishing them physically on set pieces when it mattered.
For a while, I’ve accused this Everton team of being a soft touch. When teams need a goal or a win, we’ve often seemed to be the fall guys who let it happen, but once we got that first goal, we were determined to keep going.
Dwight McNeil’s in-game play was sloppy, giving the ball away several times, but his set-piece delivery was back to his best. Unlike last season, we haven’t been the best on set-pieces so far this term, and a lot of that has been down to deliveries.
It’s about having the confidence to whip the balls in but against Wolves it was refreshing to see that it wasn’t all the same, it wasn’t always to the back post. We finally mixed it up.
It was a convincing win in the end while Jack Harrison should have hit the target twice and we had two goals disallowed so there could have easily been four more goals than we were actually credited with. For once, It was good to see us actually punish an opponent who was struggling, we didn’t leave the door open for them, even once we’d got a couple of goals ahead.
Rearranged derby should be more of an occasion
The result will have given our lads a bit of confidence and our neighbours dropped a couple of points at Newcastle on the same night and have got a few injuries so it felt like it might be the old cliche of the form book going out of the window for last Saturday’s Merseyside Derby before it was postponed. On derby days, you’re nervous for all the right and wrong reasons, you’re excited for it, but you’re also dreading it.
I think Liverpool might have even been a bit more nervous than us going into it with the weather not being the best and us going into it on the back of a decent performance. In a way though I was pleased that it was called off.
I don’t think that the last fixture between Everton and Liverpool at Goodison Park should be played at 12:30pm. I’m now looking forward to the prospect of the rearranged fixture being a night game and it would be a fitting finale for the final Merseyside Derby at Goodison to take place under the lights to make it more of an occasion.