Set piece defence falters again

It feels as though we have traveled back in time to the Roberto Martinez era, because set piece defending is once again a worrying issue. Everton squandered a relatively decent first half performance thanks to some iffy defending on a Sheffield United corner kick.

Add it to the list of things that Marco Silva needs to work out with this team, but goals off set pieces will kill this team all season. Everton still may have ended up scoring no goals in this match. But by letting Sheffield take the lead going into the half, the chance of victory for the Toffees dropped dramatically.

It has already been discussed how this team is somehow struggling to score week after week. But for a team with no real fighting spirit, these terrible goals will sink Everton.

Fortress Goodison shows some cracks

This loss would have been hard to take no matter what the venue was. But the fact that it was at home made it that much worse. Going into this match, Everton had not lost a match at Goodison since February of last season. Additionally all but one of those matches were clean sheets for the home side.

With that in mind, it was more than a little distressing to see Everton give up two goals to a newly promoted side. One thing was fairly certain going into this season, Everton were going to defend well at home. This match was the first crack in that armor, a crack that this team must not allow to spread.

Right now this team appears to be in shambles. Hopefully they can right the ship before things get too messy, but scoring points at home and using Goodison to their advantage has to be a priority moving forward.

Marco Silva is on the clock

This seems to be a yearly tradition any more, but Everton appear to be having issues with their manager. Without fail any new Everton manager that comes in struggles in their second year with the club. It happened with Roberto Martinez, Ronald Koeman and now Marco Silva.

Despite another high spending summer, Everton seem no closer to moving out of the 6th to 10th place range. Unfortunately there is never any easy way forward in these situations. Ideally Marco Silva will get things in order and Everton can start getting some positive results under their belt. But if that doesn’t occur, it will be another season of arguing about the best time to fire Silva.

Some will preach patience, others will say he needs to be fired immediately. Neither solution is ideal because one side could mean further languishing in the mid-table, while the other means starting over from scratch again. Silva can help us avoid this, but he needs to get his house in order. This team is under-performing in a big way and no amount of subtle line-up changes can fix that.