Everton Fan View: It's time for the Toffees to start brushing aside the Premier League's 'lesser' teams

I’m as bad as any fan in regards to letting the emotion of a victory cloud your view on history – except when you have to take a step back and realise that things won’t be that easy. Football isn’t, and never will be, played on paper. If it was, we would have lost to Man City, instead we beat them 4-0 and had outstanding performances from all areas.

Our next five games are against Crystal Palace, Stoke, Bournemouth, Middlesbrough and Sunderland. On paper that should be 15 points, but we all know that it won’t be. What it does allow however, is ambitions to get close to that number. From those types of games we should be aiming for 10+ points and we should be winning at least three of them. 10 points is what we got from those games in the reverse fixtures and hopefully we can beat that.

Everton for a while now though have sat in this in-between zone in the league where we can look down on most clubs, but still can’t get in the Champions League positions. It has developed a curious mentality of anticipating the big matches and only getting excited about those fixtures. It has generally meant that the players and fans are flat when it comes to playing clubs we expect to beat. Clubs that expect to beat us however? Well we like having a good crack at them.

That generally means that Everton perform a lot better against the likes of Arsenal and Man City than the likes of Bournemouth or Burnley. Against the lesser clubs we can’t afford to have that mentality, because for a club like Crystal Palace, every game is crucial to them at the moment. Turning up and being professional about your business is what the biggest clubs do, and it’s what we need to start doing.

We beat Man City, so we’re surely going to beat Crystal Palace? It’s never that easy. As I said I fall into this trap time and time again, it’s so easy to do. After we beat Southampton 3-0, I thought Leicester would be the ones going out of the FA Cup on that Saturday, but instead we did. Maybe the players had the same thought process as I did, but it’s not conducive to winning.

To make things look easy, you have to prepare yourself for them to be difficult. I doubt Antonio Conte’s Chelsea are strolling through training sessions expecting to beat all the lesser teams in the league, they work hard at it and it shows on the pitch.

So with these five ‘easy’ games we’ve got coming up it’ll be interesting to see where the mentality is. The feeling around the club is good, we’re making signings, our form has improved and we’ve just beaten Man City 4-0. The players should be primed to go on a good run and the fixtures allow that to happen. We’re 7th, but a long way from 6th. We need to make sure that if any of the clubs above us slip up, we’re in the best position to leapfrog them.

Everton have had a habit of making difficult games look easy and easy games look difficult. It’s a habit that needs to be broken as we need to start making more ‘easy’ games actually look easy, hopefully we start to see that habit broken over the next few weeks.