It’s unlikely to be the game which gets all the back page splashes and it probably won’t be up first on Match of the Day – but Ipswich Town’s meeting with Everton at Portman Road on Saturday may well be the most important match in the Premier League this weekend.
This is a game between two sides who both need to win to establish their credentials as teams that might just beat the drop this season. For the home side, it’s an opportunity to register a first win and build upon a couple of promising recent performances against Brighton & Hove Albion and Aston Villa. For Everton, it’s a chance to maintain the small surge of momentum they picked up just before the international break, and to put a dire start to the season firmly behind them. But only one team will be feeling good about their prospects by the end of the afternoon.
So far, Ipswich have looked more likely than the other newly-promoted sides to put up a fight. Having signed some of the cream of the Championship over the summer, they have some quality and much of it is young and up-and-coming. They have a manager in Kieran McKenna who is widely regarded as being among the most exciting coaches in the game, and who has already been linked with a slew of top jobs. But none of that has yet translated into three points.
The Tractor Boys need to find a way to get their attacking talent working in unison. They need to create more chances. Not to put too fine a point on it, they need to start scoring goals. Only Manchester United, Crystal Palace and Southampton have scored fewer, and their xG of 5.0 is the lowest in the top flight. Given the players they have, more can be expected.
Liam Delap has showed glimmers, scoring three in his last two games and looking especially dangerous against Aston Villa, when his skill with the ball at his feet, ability to attack space and predatory finishing were on full display. But behind Delap, there hasn’t been enough intent or threat.
Jack Clarke doesn’t seem to be quite up to speed yet, Omari Hutchinson has shown flashes but hasn’t found consistency, Wes Burns was only an occasional goalscorer even in the second tier, and Sammie Szmodics, when played, has been deployed in a deeper role than that which he enjoyed so much with Blackburn Rovers, when he scored 33 goals operating as a false nine and getting into far more space around the edge of the area.
Outside of Delap, it’s Szmodics who is the most likely player to provide the goals required to stay up. An instinctive finisher who can score from almost any range given time and half a yard, it’s up to McKenna to find ways to put him in those positions more often. Clarke and Hutchinson are young and still developing, while Burns, one of their best players in League One a couple of years ago, may be a little out of his depth.
If McKenna can figure out how to get the goals – expected and actual – ticking upwards, then Ipswich will start to look like a team that can survive in the top flight, but he doesn’t have time on his side. A home game against another struggling side is precisely the kind of match that they simply have to win in order to earn enough points to stay up.
Everton, meanwhile, have their own attacking problems. Their seven goals represent just one more than Saturday’s opponents, and their xG of 6.8 puts them 17th in the Premier League. As with Ipswich, there is a sense that they lack a plan to get the ball in the net and they look overly reliant on flashes of excellence from Dwight McNeil, who is playing some of his best football. It doesn’t help that four of their seven strikes have come in games which they have contrived to lose 3-2.
Only Wolverhampton Wanderers have shipped more goals than the 15 Everton have let in thus far. Last season, defence was their strong suit, as is typical for a Sean Dyche side, but they have been dismal at the back, although they did finally keep their first clean sheet of the league campaign against Newcastle United in their last game prior to the October international break.
The absence of Jarrad Branthwaite – who has at least some chance of playing this weekend – has been part of the problem, but by Dyche’s standards the back line has been sloppy and slapdash, with individual errors compounding oceans of space offered to opposing players. Dyche has extensive experience of tightening defences up, but if they carry on playing the way they did earlier in the season, Everton are in deep trouble regardless of whether they find more routes to goal.
The positive spin available to Everton fans is that Dyche sides almost invariably start slowly. He has won just one game in the first month of the season in the last five years. For some reason, no matter how disciplined his team are by the end of a campaign, they seem to struggle to get going again. When his teams’ backs are against the wall, however, they usually find a way to fight effectively. Usually, at least. Dyche has failed before.
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