I think the crowd are bored of Everton approach - Sean Dyche is turning us into Burnley

We're trying to make sure the last ever season at Goodison Park is memorable for all the right reasons, but it’s starting to become memorable for all the wrong reasons. The crowd look bored, they look like they’re finding it all tiresome.

Brentford had 10 men, but they were more proactive and made a substitution before us and brought a striker on because they could smell blood. They knew if they got an opportunity, and showed a bit of quality, then they could nick it.

For Everton, that’s pathetic, that’s abysmal. Sean Dyche’s press conferences, both before and after games, have left me scratching my head in terms of the way he’s been argumentative to reporters but the questions they’re asking are only what everyone else is thinking.

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All we do is try and play the long ball, huff and puff, hope for knock downs and if our set-pieces are good, we might nick a goal. Our set-pieces were poor against Brentford, and they worked last season, teams are getting wise to us.

It goes to James Tarkowski at the back post, and if the ball isn’t long enough then the goalkeeper comes and catches it. Your standards have got to be higher... surprise the opposition by whipping one into the near post or cutting it back to the edge of the box.

The crowd knows what’s going to happen, so do the opposition. It’s boring, it’s a hard watch.

Because we’re Evertonians and we love the club inside out, we turn up at Goodison Park, hoping that we’ll see something different. However, realistically we know it’s the same old stuff, with no surprise element whatsoever.... we’re turning into Burnley, with an attitude of ‘that’s enough,’ but it’s not enough.

What really frustrated me and had me tearing my hair out, was watching us try and play against 10 men. I heard Dyche’s comments about how it can be difficult playing against 10 men, but if you make it difficult, then it will be, as Everton made it easy for them.

I was sat in the Park End, and at times I could see 21 players – everyone apart from Jordan Pickford – inside the 18-yard box as the ball was getting played forward in the middle of the pitch. I was thinking: ‘What are we doing? Why aren’t we wide?’

Why wasn’t Jesper Lindstrom standing with his heels on the touchline? Why wasn’t Iliman Ndiaye doing the same on the other side?

We got wide in the final third and put crosses in, but they were poor. That’s what the opposition want you to do, as you get closer to goal, they want to force you out wide so it’s easier to defend.

What’s not easy is getting dragged left to right, and then Everton finding spaces in between, but that didn’t happen. You’ve got to be patient, and able to switch the play from left to right in the midfield, stretch them out, and then tiredness sets in and gaps start opening up.

Whether it’s Dwight McNeil or Ndiaye operating in the number 10 role, you’ve got to create space for them to hurt the opposition. However, we made it compact, which makes it easier for the opposition to defend, it baffled me that we kept doing the same thing, time and time again, expecting a different result.

The lack of movement up front is horrendous, whether it’s Dominic Calvert-Lewin or Beto, there’s no running in behind, running across defenders, breaking your neck to get in front. It feels like a case of ‘you’ve got to find me’ and it’s just static play.

When you’re up against that, as a defender you’re in dream world. If anyone was watching the game on television and had just flicked over, they wouldn’t have known which team had an extra player.

Brentford still passed through us with a man less. Pickford had to make a fantastic save in the first half and then in the second half, if Keane Lewis-Potter had a better right foot, it should have been a goal.

He was actually their best player, and he was playing left-back and he’s not even a left-back. He’s not a defender, but we didn’t even try and run at him, Lindstrom was running towards the centre of the pitch, and he had a free game.

Why aren’t we looking at the opposition and trying to pinpoint their weaknesses? If we put McNeil at left-back, he’ll have a good go and he’ll try, but he’s not a defender, so they’re going to target him. It feels like we don’t do that.

Dyche said that Brentford did well with their defence, but they didn’t have to sweat too much. There were a couple of blocks right at the end, but you shouldn’t be waiting until the last minute to force the issue.

We had a lot of shots, but most of them were from long range, and that’s exactly what you want to do as a defender. You’re thinking: ‘Let them shoot, they’re not going to score from there.’

Let’s have a bit of guile about us. Instead, it’s static play, it’s passing the buck.

This feels like an all-time low. Everton are the soft touch again – a team who have lost all their games away from home gets a clean sheet with 10 men, and for us that’s three games on the bounce with no goals scored.

Everton need to mix things up - even one of our players can see that

An unwillingness to mix things up cost Everton dearly against Brentford. Jordan Pickford was screaming over to Sean Dyche, calling for him to make a substitution and that’s not the first time I’ve clocked that.

Roy Keane used to do that, screaming over to the manager and telling him that it wasn’t working, because their standards are higher. They realise that to get maximum points out of a game, something needs to happen and if the manager can’t spot that then it’s up to the leaders on the pitch.

As a left-back, I’d been told to always put the ball into the danger zone when I got out wide. I went to PSV and kept on doing it in training, thinking: ‘I’m whipping great balls in.’

The manager Guus Hiddink pulled me to one side, and said: ‘Why do you keep on crossing it over there?’ I told him: ‘That’s the danger zone, that’s what I’ve been taught.’

He explained to me that there are moments in the game where you have got to pick out your player. You have to pinpoint the striker but he said to me: ‘Three of your crosses Michael have gone to the midfielder. Well done, he might score, but in the real world on a Saturday, he won’t be there. Raise your standards.’

I was like: ‘Wow.’ I’d have got a pat on the back in the UK for doing that, but that wasn’t enough in Dutch football, I had to raise my standards, and Dyche needs to do that with Everton’s players, and they also need to raise their own standards and take accountability.

Nobody changed it up. We had Pickford, four defenders, and two sitting midfielders, so that’s seven players doing next to nothing from an attacking point of view.

That left us with just four players trying to break down Brentford’s 10, sitting back. We could have been proactive and put someone who is forward-thinking or can control the ball in the middle of the pitch on.

It’s not Idrissa Gueye’s game. He made so many sloppy errors, because we were asking him to try and dictate and create opportunities.

He was shooting from outside for box. After he’s done that a couple of times, make a change, bring someone on who can create issues and play little, around the corner passes.

It all goes to show that both the players and Dyche are more scared of losing than trying to win a football game. Many inside Goodison Park were thinking at half-time: ‘This is a huge 45 minutes coming up for Dyche.’

The pressure was on him because he said the team were going to try and be a bit more expansive this season. However, because of the Bournemouth and Aston Villa results, he seems to have gone full circle and retreated back to being Mr Negative again, and it’s far too negative.

When Dyche was at Burnley, he came up with that famous line, telling his team that Everton “don’t know how to win,” and some of those players are still here now. They don’t want to make mistakes, so they don’t try a 50/50 ball, a nice cute one into the striker’s feet.

Never once did we try and put it into either Calvert-Lewin or Beto’s feet, so he could pin the defender, try and move the ball to the side, and try and get a shot. Instead, it was just lazy crosses into the box and it’s not good enough.

Everything we did helped Brentford, it didn’t help us to try and win the game. They’ve probably just had the easiest game with 10 men that they’ll ever have in their lives.

We don’t seem to know how to press teams and force errors from the opposition. Surely, the players have played shadow game football at Finch Farm, working on how to manipulate the ball against nine or 10 men when you’ve got the ball? It looked like we’d never done that before.