Everton manager Sean Dyche insists his focus remains on the club’s fit players while refusing to offer a timescale on Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s return. Asked when his number nine might be back fit,
Sean Dyche said: “The plan is to keep working with the group we have got.”
In sharp contrast to Everton’s predicament, Aston Villa’s Ollie Watkins – who was linked with a potential move to Goodison Park at the start of the season following an alleged falling out with then-manager Steven Gerrard – became the first player to score in five consecutive top flight matches for the Midlands club since Paul Rideout in 1985, a decade before he was the Blues’ FA Cup final match-winner against Manchester United at Wembley. When comparing Watkins’ hot streak to his own side’s goal famine with Calvert-Lewin sidelined,
Sean Dyche said: “That is life in football, I am open to coaching this team and working with them, but I cannot mend people’s bodies. That is a big one for me, that is a big ask, at the end of the day we are working with the group it is not one player. I have had challenges before where you look at teams and say they haven’t got this, they haven’t got that. You could argue that with any team apart from maybe Manchester City, but it has never been an excuse in my career. We have to make sure we find ways of being productive and that is the challenge of football. That is why it is a team sport and not an individual sport.”
