Silva provides his vision for ‘something big’ at Everton

Everton take on their fourth London opponent in a row this weekend with a trip to Fulham. Speaking ahead of the game, manager Marco Silva was asked about Kurt Zouma’s comments that Silva is creating ‘something big’ at Everton, and what that meant to him.

“First it’s good to have this kind of feedback from the players, because they are the first ones that can see and feel what we are doing every day together.

“You know the history of the club, the culture. Since the first day I joined the club I had said it will be difficult, but step by step we will do it together. Our club should be participating every year in European football, playing European competitions is our target.

“It’s not really easy, many clubs want the same, but it’s something that has to be in our minds, has to be a goal for us. For us to achieve that we have to keep doing the right things, keep growing as a squad.

“We have to prepare well to achieve that, at the end it our desire inside and that of our fans as well.”

The Blues are in the thick of the seventh-placed battle which could win an automatic berth in the Europa League qualifiers for next season, but Silva insisted that his focus was on finishing the season as strongly as possible.

“We have to keep fighting to achieve the best position possible in the table. This is most important thing for us.

“Our goal is to improve on the season before, we are fighting to achieve that and we will keep doing that to the end of the season. Then we will see what it means for us.

“You keep growing as a team if you play the best teams, in the best competitions. Of course we are playing in the Premier League which is the best competition, playing these type of games week in and week out we can continue to get better.”

When asked what had changed for the Blues in their current good streak of form, Silva insisted that it was nothing too different, and that the work being put in during training was starting to pay off.

“Everything we’ve been working on and preparing since the first day, we haven’t changed many, many things. Of course you want to increase some things but in our model we prepare our players in the best way to play the matches and achieve good results.

“We learned some things, there were some tough moments for us. It was a good learning for us to improve as a team. We are working the same way but now the results are showing different things to you but the players they know what we’re working on now we did in the past also, like in the first two-three months of the season when we achieved good results.

“Things are more settled, we started to know each other better. I don’t want to repeat this again, but we have had a big number of new players in the past 18-19 months.

“The time to gel everything, the time for it all to work is important. The break we had after the bad run was also important.”