Everton manager Sean Dyche insists his players have to take responsibility as a team for not taking chances against Wolverhampton Wanderers in the same manner as they dealt with defensive woes at Aston Villa. Although the Blues were much-improved at the back from their horror show at Villa Park six days earlier, where they were beaten 4-0, they still slumped to a third successive defeat at the start of a Premier League season for the first time as the lost 1-0 to Gary O’Neil’s side.
Sean Dyche said: “It’s very frustrating, probably as bad as Fulham in the sense of creating chances but as I spoke about then, not just chances, high quality chances. It was a generally good performance and a big reaction from the Aston Villa game but we don’t score a goal. At the end of the day, it’s our responsibility to score goals. Everyone talks about strikers and of course it’s a big part of their role but as a team we’re creating chances and we can’t quite find that goal. Once again their keeper is man-of-the-match but we shouldn’t be making their keeper man-of-the-match, we should be putting the chances in and then nobody talks about their keeper. So strangely, it’s a reverse positive in some ways but it’s not a positive when you don’t win a game. The first game of the season was ‘right, ok, we created lots of chances, we learn from that and take it on’ but we’ve done it again today. You go ‘right, ok, that’s the second time out of three games.’ One got away, we weren’t good enough in the middle game but this game we played well, we should be winning the game but we don’t so that’s a big frustration. I said to the players: ‘I put a responsibility on the defensive side of the game when we’re not right, which I did against Villa, because we were miles off but then we’ve got to ask questions why we’re not taking chances because so many really good chances today don’t end up in the back of the net.’”
The game pitted the two lowest-scoring Premier League teams of last season and in terms of creating answers to their lack of goals,
Sean Dyche said: “We found solutions last year but we found them in the dying breaths of the last game of the season. The idea was to not be in that situation again. I haven’t got all of the history but I think it’s fair to say before I got here it was that kind of thing so therefore there’s a collective mentality towards that. We’ve got a lot of talented players here so how many of them are going to stand up and take those chances. As I’ve said, if I’m going to question the unit on a defensive side with the team and their responsibilities then I’ve got to question it on the attacking side as well and I have done to the players. We have to take responsibility for how many chances we create with not scoring a goal because out of those two games – Fulham and this game – that is an abundance of chances at this level of the market as we all know it’s very difficult to create that many chances and not take them.”
Everton did have the ball in the back of Wolves’ net through Abdoulaye Doucoure when the score was 0-0 but the effort was ruled out for offside with a VAR check upholding the original decision.
Sean Dyche said: “I haven’t seen it back so I’ll wait and see how tight it is. But it’s not just about that, we were in so many good positions today to score a goal and we didn’t.”
