Everton Fan View: Best players don't make the best system

At the start of the season Ronald Koeman was tinkering around with all manner of different players and formations, with little success after our initial bright first few games. He then seemed to settle on a formation that looked like it was going to get the best out of the players.

Three central defenders, with Baines and Coleman pushed up and two central midfielders behind Ross Barkley and two attackers ahead of him. It all seemed to be going well as the Dutchman settled on a system which was getting results.

Then he changed it. Why? To try and get more of the talented players onto the pitch. Tom Davies has had a brilliant start to his Everton career, Idrissa Gueye has been one of the best midfielders in the league this season and Morgan Schneiderlin is our new big signing. At the moment Koeman wants them all to play, and you can understand the temptation.

It all changed at half-time during the Stoke game when Mason Holgate was removed for James McCarthy as the extra centre back now came and extra midfielder. The logic seems good and it must have been something the manager had in mind for him to make the change at the break. No goals were scored by either team in the second half we played out a 1-1 draw. You could say that removing the extra centre back showed our defensive frailties in the next match, conceding three to Bournemouth, but you can’t read too much into such a game where you score six goals in a nine goal thriller.

Then the Middlesbrough game happened, which was a boring 0-0. Not much has changed in terms of team shape, as Schneiderlin has been dropping back so far that he sometimes looks like the 3^rd centre back. I’d say his best position is as a deep playmaker, but in recent games he has been too far back to use his considerable talents.

Dropping him, Gueye or Davies would be a difficult decision but it’s one that might have to be made for the benefit of the team. Before Stoke we’d won our previous three league matches, it will be interesting to see if Koeman goes back to that for the next game.

You’d think out of those three players it would be Tom Davies who’d take a step back. He has a brilliant future ahead of him, but expecting such a young player to perform week-in, week-out at this stage is a big ask, and has shown at times that he can make naïve errors. Having him as an impact substitution may be the best thing for him at this stage, and first in line if either Gueye or Schneiderlin can’t play. It’d be another talented youngster who’d replace him in the team in the form of Mason Holgate, who has had an excellent season.

Koeman, however, might not want to make that call and plan to persist with just the two centre backs. Two and a half games isn’t the best sample size to know what is working, but the team looked out of rhythm vs Middlesbrough where they had looked a lot more fluid at the start of 2017.

It’s a case of sometimes the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, and not trying to put the most talented eleven players out there, but instead eleven players that make the best system, and so far this season, that has been three at the back.