Dwight McNeil, Dwight McNeil

To be on your own

And score away from home.

I probably should have hung fire, crying relegation in with the last piece, and been what Steve Bunce always calls an ‘after timer’, given Everton’s quite remarkable mid-70s Eastern European performance at the Amex Stadium. 

It was more shocking than that bit in The Crying Game. Brighton have rightly been lauded as a shining example of what is possible in the Premier League with a bit of patience and planning – they fucking battered Manchester United the other night – and indeed their result at Goodison was as big an ‘oh bollocks this is bad’ moment as… any of the other ones. But this incarnation of the Toffees, with Dominic Calvert-Lewin approaching his best, and an actual specialist right-back, as opposed to some lads who do the weights and are half-decent at the bleep test, absolutely shredded the home side every time they crossed the halfway line. 

It started in the first minute, when Calvert-Lewin’s pirouette down the line won him enough space and time to cut the ball towards Abdoulaye Doucoure at the back post. It was an awkward finish, just behind him, but he kept his cool and steered the ball home. 

Do you know what, you’ve watched all the goals a hundred times now, there’s no point me going through the lot. Needless to say, as we see very occasionally with Pep Guardiola’s sides, these sorts of teams crave control, and going behind can ruffle them, as they get caught between playing their normal patient game and trying to force the issue. 

And that was only exacerbated when Everton doubled their lead. I’m doing it, I’m describing them all aren’t I?

McNeil, the absolute stud, had options near him in the box as he progressed down the left, but instead of gambling on passing into the crowd, he bypassed the lot and lofted a the ball into the path of Doucoure on the right. The merciless Malian never even broke stride, catching the cross at waist height and flashing it inside Jason Steele’s near post.

In South Yorkshire a pint of Jack Rabbit Chardonnay got lashed at the telly.

And it got even better before half time, as Reverend Lovejoy (McNeil), picked up an attack that seemed to be fizzling out when the exceptional Alex Iwobi slightly overhit his low cross. McNeil flashed the ball back into the six yard box though, it wrong-footed Steele, and before you knew it, it had deflected off the keeper’s ankle and into the net. 

Oh boy.

Robert de Zerbi, whose sartorial style screams ‘MTv Turkey’, threw on a load of subs and his team did have a proper go in the second half. However, when they did manage to penetrate the Blues’ bullish backline, they encountered a leery, limited-limbed Mackem in the form of his life.

Some of the saves Jordan Pickford made were just incredible but,  dare we say it, much like a certain Neville Southall of this parish, you start to just expect them as par for the course now. 

If in the final reckoning we look back and say, ‘who was our Richarlison this season?’, it’s Pickford. He’s something very special. He’s got ‘it’. That fearlessness that you want to see in every player but only the very best possess. All the shit he’s been through, it just looks like it’s made him stronger. 

Aaron Ramsdale? 

Grow up, Scribes West, you pack of melts.

Anyway, McNeil then walked one in and celebrated, Ross Barkley style, following a great break and pass from Iwobi. It’s easy this shit.

Brighton eventually spawned one but even that wasn’t the end of the hi-jinks. Oh no, not at all.

Deep into injury time, McNeil again drove at the home defence, and had Iwobi breaking to support him on his right, but instead of passing to his tireless teammate, he just gave the ball a good old-fashioned John Bull Brexit Jeremy Clarkson Paul Sykes boiled beef and carrots Big Trak wallop into the roof of the net. The jet-stream behind the shot actually had the letters S-W-O-O-O-O-S-H spelled out along it, like an effort from Dave ‘Scorer’ Storry. 

Think Roy of the Rovers for boss goosers.

Anyway that, as they say, was fucking that.

It’s not done yet though. Someone else might go and get a mad result – like Leeds at home to Newcastle on Saturday, for instance – but by jingo it changes the landscape. It’s the others who are playing catch up now, as we all rapidly ‘run out of road’, as people keep saying.

Incidentally, why do newspapers still insist on predicting the relegation places by ‘feeding the fixtures into a supercomputer’? Is there a machine the size of a house with a team of boffins loading punch cards into it and frantically reading dials? A spreadsheet would suffice, surely? 

No wonder print media’s all going bust.