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Back to reality for Evertonians

After four consecutive wins and sitting in second place, the fans were obviously going to get excited but it’s always dangerous to get too far ahead of ourselves. Two consecutive losses have shown that everything isn’t as rosy in the Everton garden that we’d wish, and there are a lot of things that may cause concern for the rest of the season ahead.

One of the main ones is Ross Barkley, he gets unfair criticism a lot of the time, and he definitely isn’t the only player in poor form. He is however, in a position where we have no depth. Everton needs him to be playing well at the moment, but he simply isn’t. He’s also an Evertonian who is meant to be one of England’s bright stars, dropping him would be a big story and bring unwanted attention on the club and the decisions of Ronald Koeman. It would be hard decision for the manager to drop him, but Barkley is seemingly doing everything he can to make that decision easier and easier for him. Time out of the side might be a good thing for him, even if we don’t have a natural replacement.

As I alluded to there, if it was just Barkley that was the problem then we’d be fine, but Everton have a few young and talented players who will go through periods of bad form. Everton suffer when Lukaku has a bad game, another position where we have no depth, and Mirallas is inconsistent as well and hasn’t built on his bright start to the season. Yannick Bolasie shown at Crystal Palace that he is prone to having bad games, and at the moment Deulofeu is playing the worst football I’ve ever seen him play. The exiting players we have in the side come with the cost of having to sit through games like Norwich and Bournemouth occasionally when nothing comes off and it leaves everyone feeling very frustrated.

As a manager, it’s hard to win football matches when all your inconsistent players have a bad game at the same time. That’s what’s happened in our last two matches, the positive spin is that the bad form surely won’t last for too long. In the meantime Koeman will have some interesting decisions to make about whether he sticks with the players that are currently underperforming.

Fans get carried away with wins, and equally get carried away with losses too. The two defeats have placed our feet firmly back on the ground and put our expectations on the season in check. The confidence in a great season however is still there, and the start has still been a good one. When you rely on such young and inconsistent talent, then the bad days are always going to happen, you just hope you get a lot more great ones.