You know you’re struggling when those who have your best interests at heart start concurring with rival fans and words uttered by both Gary Lineker and Bournemouth supporters in the Vitality Stadium during their 1-0 win over Everton will be burning the ears of The Friedkin Group right now.

The Blues were in their usual graveyard slot on Match of the Day following a fixture at a venue that continues to see them buried having suffered five consecutive defeats there in all competitions, and afterwards a graphic titled ‘Toothless Toffees’ showing that Sean Dyche’s side are 19th in the Premier League for goals; 18th for shots; 19th for shot conversion rate; 19th for expected goals and 20th for expected goals per shot flashed up.

Speaking on the show, the club’s former striker Gary Lineker, whose individual scoring total of 40 in his solitary season at Goodison Park in 1985/86, matched the entire team’s Premier League haul for 2023/24, said: “I love Everton, I really do. But boy oh boy, they’re hard to watch at the moment.” Try being there in the flesh, home and away each weekend like those thousands of loyal but long-suffering Blues who hand over their hard-earned cash to witness such displays... unfortunately what Evertonians witnessed on their round trip of over 500 miles to Dorset was nothing out of the ordinary.

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Let’s have this right, many of those who are on the Premier League circuit will attest that Bournemouth are one of the friendlier clubs out there when it comes to welcoming you to their ground (in Everton’s case it might be because they know there’s a guaranteed three points in store). But in all seriousness, there are a lot of good people there in various departments, including the old gent on the door to the Media Suite who often hands out some kind of chocolate to you when you sign in, even if this correspondent foolishly stuck the Penguin biscuit he was given in his trouser pocket where it subsequently melted despite the plummeting January temperatures.

But the Blues becoming the butt of the joke to followers of the Cherries is a new low though. Perhaps – especially at a ground smaller than League Two Tranmere Rovers’ Prenton Park where old lower division habits die hard and many of the patrons still chant: “You’re s***, ahh,” when the opposition keeper takes a goal kick – you can shrug off taunts like: “You’re going down with the Scummers.”

That in itself is somewhat amusing as it’s a reference to Southampton and seems to be a Bournemouth attempt to geg in on Portsmouth’s inter-Hampshire rivalry with the Saints. A more creative jibe was the: “Take your time, take your time, Jordan Pickford, take your time, take your time, I say, take your time, take your time, Jordan Pickford, playing football the Everton way.”

Many in the home camp were frustrated by what they saw as the Blues’ supposed time-wasting, and their ‘witty riposte’ was of course a bastardisation of the “Sixty Grand, Seamus Coleman,” song. But to put things into context, the Blues club captain alone has played more Premier League matches (367) than AFC Bournemouth (286).

Indeed, Everton, the club who have played more top flight matches than anyone else in English football, and are the only founder members of both the Football League in 1888 and Premier League in 1992 to be ever-presents in the latter, have won more League Championships than the Cherries have gone consecutive matches without defeat at this level as they took that sequence to a club record eight by beating the Blues.

When it comes to footballing pedigree, Bournemouth have achieved nothing compared to Everton with The Friedkin Group celebrating the club's rich heritage in a 90-second video on LinkedIn shortly after their takeover. But past glories count for nothing in 2025, with the Cherries, like Brighton & Hove Albion, another south coast outfit who have never lifted a major honour, and somewhere the Blues go later this month, an upwardly mobile force, in stark contrast to Sean Dyche’s strugglers.

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This Everton side experimented with a bit more expansive football early in the season but having had their fingers burned in the reverse fixture with Bournemouth at Goodison Park when their most free-flowing display of the campaign somehow ended with a 3-2 defeat after their inexplicable late collapse, they have reverted to type and this attritional display was standard fare. Again, home fans taunted the visitors with: “How do you watch this every week?”

But this wasn’t just banter to try and score points. You have to walk among the Bournemouth supporters to get back to the Press Room at the Vitality Stadium at half-time, and even when they weren’t addressing their Blues counterparts directly, you could hear the Cherries faithful among themselves, genuinely taken aback by how little their opponents were offering in terms of creativity.

In hiring Dyche there was an understanding that style might be sacrificed for substance but while that agreement has value if the team are picking up results, the situation becomes increasingly unpalatable if the manager is unable to uphold his side of the bargain. In his press conference following the defeat at Bournemouth, the Everton manager told the ECHO: “I’ve tried to be honest with you,” after referencing expectations for this term.

The 53-year-old said: “At the beginning of the season there was all this noise about ‘we’ve had this big window and we could do this and do that, it is the last season in the Old Lady’ and all that sort of stuff. I made it clear, I said I don’t know where that has all come from.”

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While it’s true that since, the summer of 2022/23, the first transfer window after current director of football Kevin Thelwell came to the club, Everton are the only Premier League side to make a trading profit in the transfer market, the general consensus is that having retained the services of Jarrad Branthwaite and Dominic Calvert-Lewin while making a clutch of new signings in the summer, the squad is stronger than last season, yet halfway into the campaign, the Blues have just 17 points.

When asked what reassurances he could give the fans or the new owners, Dyche also stated that no manager can do that because of “the reality of football” every time the whistle blows. Nobody was realistically expecting Everton to push for Europe this term but after the traumas of recent years, the hope was that the sleepless nights would be over and Goodison Park could be enjoyed in the final months of her existence.

You could say that the move to the new stadium is a ‘once in a lifetime’ moment but given that Everton have been at the current home for 133 years and that’s longer than any human has been alive, it’s even more than that. Financial mismanagement has ensured that this is no vintage Blues side but another “reality of football” is that it should be doing considerably better than it is, and that has already been proven previously under Dyche himself.