Everton's Jordan Pickford showcases the good, the bad and the ugly

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Everton’s start to the season is not that they are top of the league, but that they are top of the league with Jordan Pickford in the sort of mood he’s been in for the past 18 months. He is a wrecking ball of pure energy, always up for it, a player apparently determined never to regret what he didn’t do. His performance against Liverpool was a characteristic maelstrom of reflex brilliance and damaging misjudgment: he nearly cost his team the game, yet he also made two outstanding saves. He may also have cost Liverpool the title.

How bad Virgil van Dijk’s knee injury is remains to be seen, but the point is that it could have been extremely serious – and given his importance to the champions, any game he misses is significant. The Pickford challenge that caused it was typical, of a piece with the pathological proactivity that led to Denmark’s penalty against England on Wednesday. There was no need for him to come flying off his line, and certainly no need for him to fling himself at Van Dijk, scissoring the Dutchman’s right leg so it bent back horribly.

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It was a moment of grotesque recklessness that endangered the opponent, a clear instance of serious foul play and thus a red card, even if an offside call spared Everton a penalty. Yet mystifyingly, VAR checked only the offside and did not look at the challenge. Van Dijk’s upper arm, it turned out, was in advance of the last defender. Like Sadio Mané before he crossed late on for what appeared a winner from Jordan Henderson, it was deemed that a part of the body that last season would not have been considered for an offside had strayed by a matter of millimetres.

This perhaps is the biggest issue with VAR: it pedantically adjudicates on issues all but imperceptible to the human eye and yet ignores offences as blatant as Pickford’s. It’s like a parking attendant dishing out a ticket for staying two minutes too long or being an inch outside the space while ignoring the thief putting a crowbar through the windscreen.

Everton survived and Pickford survived but Van Dijk did not. That he was able to walk off rather than leaving on a stretcher may be a hopeful sign his injury is not too bad, but as soon as he had gone, the air of authority with which Liverpool had begun the game disappeared as well.

Pickford, meanwhile, proceeded to demonstrate just how good a goalkeeper he can be. His leaping save up and to his right to divert a Trent Alexander-Arnold free-kick away from the top corner was brilliant; his reflex block, springing to his right to claw out a Joël Matip header, was even better. At the same time, Adrián, with a series of aimless hoofs, was showing just why managers value Pickford’s distribution so highly. His passing accuracy may have been only 41.7% on Saturday, but that’s largely because he was so frequently passing long: he completed 11 long passes, more than twice as many as any Liverpool player.

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And yet, two minutes into injury time, it was back to liability Pickford, the sort of error it is hard to understand or to imagine any other goalkeeper making. Everything looked right as he got down to his left to block Henderson’s effort with his left arm, but rather than deflecting away, the ball somehow spun up and dropped past his desperate flail into the net. Are his arms oddly shaped? Is it something to do with his comparative lack of height? Is it a technical issue to do with weight distribution? Whatever the reason, it’s an idiosyncratic flaw that has become increasingly common.

That’s the dilemma Pickford poses. For a quarter of a century, from Louis van Gaal’s Barcelona to Pep Guardiola’s, elite football was largely about control; these days, perhaps exaggerated by the odd Covid-restricted environment and the lack of preparation time, it feels wilder again, more about managing chaos.

In that sense, Pickford is a very modern keeper, far removed from calm authoritative figures of old. But at some point Everton need to decide whether their fine start can be sustained with a human Jägerbomb in goal.