Everton have done something that is incredibly Everton, even by their own sky-high standards in this field, while Ivan Toney and Aaron Ramsdale both left the GTech Stadium on Saturday with reason to ponder the choices that have led them to the current respective points in their careers.
Everton 2-3 Bournemouth: Toffees suffer most harrowing setback yet in a truly miserable August
Oh, Everton. Oh, mates. What can you say after that? They will try and cling to positives because they pretty much have to, but the positives are all going to turn to ash. Because all the positives just look even more like negatives in the wake of that truly absurd conclusion.
For 85 minutes, this was absolutely everything Sean Dyche and Everton’s players and Everton’s fans could have wanted. They weren’t just on course for a win, they were on course for a thoroughly deserved, thoroughly convincing win. They had been the better side by a wide margin, controlling proceedings in the first half before turning that superiority into goals at the start of the second.
Job done, a first win on the board, and those two harrowing defeats to Brighton and Spurs, if not quite forgotten, then at least cast to the back of the mind.
Then Everton conceded in the 87th, 92nd and 96th minutes. And Jordan Pickford had to make a couple of heroic saves at 2-2 as well.
Every club’s support is guilty of thinking their own side uniquely idiotic or especially prone to avoidable and self-inflicted disaster but the difference with Everton fans here is that Everton fans are right.
This remains less a football club and more an exercise in how many different kinds of agony can be inflicted on fans who really don’t deserve it. So infuriating was this defeat, so entirely was the rug pulled from beneath them that there is now a compelling case to be made that the 4-0 thrashing at Spurs is in fact the least distressing result of Everton’s Premier League season thus far.
At least that one was broadly expected and featured almost none of that most cruel of emotions: hope. It was obvious what was coming from very early on there. Perhaps it shouldn’t have, given everything we know about Everton, but this one was full of hope and reasons to be cheerful before it suddenly absolutely did not. There just looked no way. They were cruising. The job seemed done.
But suddenly it wasn’t. And now, best of all, they get an international break to stew on the miserable, abject absurdity of it all while considering the very real relegation fight that looms on the horizon.
What a club.
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