Football: Ever-increasing task for Smith

Leicester City 2

Cottee 11, Izzet 38

Everton 0

Attendance: 21,037

IT WAS all over by half-time as Leicester, buoyed by the confidence they took away along with that point at Old Trafford last week, swept Everton aside to go in at the interval with a decisive 2-0 lead. In that first 45 minutes Everton had shown no indication of having the resources to pull back two goals.

Things might have been different, though, had Nick Barmby punished a mis-headed clearance by Matt Elliott instead of shooting over the bar in the 26th minute. The visitors were then a goal down.

Tony Cottee, basking in something of an Indian Summer, gave Leicester an 11th-minute lead when he allowed Theo Zagorakis's long through-ball to deceive Craig Short and then clinically lobbed the advancing Thomas Myhre.

Emile Heskey and Mustafa Izzet had chances in the first five minutes to have buried their visitors beyond recall but both were inches out. But the precision with which they had unzipped the shaky visitors' defence was ominous.

There was little respite for Everton as John Collins found himself dogged in midfield by the tenacious Neil Lennon, who had swapped his fiery Irish coiffure for the fashionable peroxide blonde, and perhaps it was inevitable that two such combative souls would end up staring at the yellow card before the final whistle.

The referee, Stephen Lodge, was reaching for his pocket with a vengeance when a melee erupted in the 30th minute after Michael Ball and Robbie Savage had clattered into each other.

By the time that order had been restored, Duncan Ferguson and Frank Sinclair had joined the throng, having concluded their own private vendetta 30 yards away.

Matters had calmed down enough for a second, well- engineered goal in the 36th minute. The powerful Heskey, revelling in the space and freedom to run at quaking defenders, sent Steve Guppy racing to the byline. The cross swept beyond the Everton defence to leave Izzet with a simple tap-in at the far post.

The substitution of Marco Materazzi by the returning prodigal son David Unsworth did add a semblance of cohesion to Everton's defence in the second half but neither Collins nor the impressive Olivier Dacourt could find the service to use the blistering pace of Danny Cadamarteri, who had replaced a struggling John Spencer at half-time.

The size of the task that the new Everton manager Walter Smith faces would seem to grow with every game.