Sean Dyche’s unusual choices vindicated as Everton take major step towards Premier League safety

Everton 2-0 Nottingham Forest: Long-range strikes by Idrissa Gueye and Dwight McNeil earned the Toffees a vital win over their relegation-threatened rivals

Dwight McNeil celebrates after scoring Everton’s second goal (Getty Images)

Everton like a points-deduction derby. Stripped of eight points this season, they have regained six of them at the expense of Nottingham Forest, the other team with an asterisk in the table. Failing Financial Fair Play may prove less damaging for Forest than an inability to take anything from Everton. In a world of revised tables, having lost four points themselves, Forest find themselves out of the drop zone by a lone point. Everton have taken 38 for the season, the normal marker for safety, and find themselves on 30. It feels almost enough; perhaps, in a campaign interrupted and altered by the deliberations of various independent commissions, Everton may be spared a fraught last game at Goodison Park, the sense their fate rests on 90 minutes. The nervous end to the campaign could be on the banks of the Trent, not the Mersey.

Mathematically, it is not over yet. But Everton are five points clear of the relegation zone, when the three teams immediately beneath them have only four games to go, with perhaps just the need to avoid defeat at Luton on 3 May. Arguably the most torrid season in their history may end with a 71st consecutive campaign of top-flight football secured. To a backdrop of enduring uncertainty amid Premier League charges, hard-earned points disappearing and the drawn-out takeover that remains in doubt, with a lack of funds at a club that can look drowning in debt, it would represent a job accomplished in the hardest of circumstances by Sean Dyche. His football is attritional but Dyche can seek validation from the standings, and the reality is that Everton only took 36 points in the whole of last season, 38 in the previous campaign. Now they have earned 38 on the field with five games to go.

And if this brush with relegation ends up being – by Everton’s recent standards – a relatively comfortable affair, perhaps Idrissa Gueye and Dwight McNeil will not quite have the status of Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Abdoulaye Doucoure, scorers of the goals that definitively kept them up in the last two seasons, saviours when all threatened to be lost.

Idrissa Gueye, left, celebrates after scoring Everton’s first goal (Reuters)

But two long-range strikes capped Everton’s redemption tale after their humiliation at Chelsea on Monday and told stories in themselves. One of the few signings of the Farhad Moshiri era to make Everton a sizeable profit, when he joined Paris Saint-Germain in 2019, Gueye’s goal could be a parting gift. Given how erratic some of his shooting has been, it felt out of character. McNeil, who joined for Frank Lampard in the summer 2022 transfer window where Everton’s expenditure contributed to their FFP breach for the last year, was one of Everton’s rescuers last spring and chipped in again here.

He drove a 20-yard shot in off the post. Before then, Gueye had latched on to Ola Aina’s header out and bobbled in a 25-yard half-volley; the Senegalese’s effort had precision but not power and Matz Sels, the fifth goalkeeper Forest signed in four transfer windows, seemed too slow to dive. If not an error as such, it was another example of unconvincing goalkeeping from Forest.

And, indeed, another day of inadequate away form. Their record since promotion now stands at three wins from 36 outings on the road; with trips to Sheffield United and Burnley to come, they may require an upturn. Certainly Everton can testify to the importance of such six-pointers. Their only other league win since Christmas came at the expense of other relegation rivals, in Burnley.

Sean Dyche, right, who ditched his trademark dark suit at Goodison Park, got the better of Nuno Espirito Santo (Reuters)

For Forest, meanwhile, a season of complaints continued as they claimed a penalty for handball against Ashley Young and again when the 38-year-old challenged the younger, and rather quicker, Callum Hudson-Odoi. Yet for a team packed with attacking players, who made an enterprising start, they fashioned too little. Jordan Pickford, horribly culpable at Stamford Bridge, made a fine save from Dyche’s Burnley stalwart Chris Wood. Morgan Gibbs-White squandered a wonderful chance, shooting wide after an hour. Otherwise, James Tarkowski and Jarrad Branthwaite defended defiantly. Everton’s effort was encapsulated in a clash of heads that resulted in the substitute Beto being stretchered off.

But wholehearted commitment delivered Everton the response they wanted. James Garner and Amadou Onana were dropped after the 6-0 drubbing at Chelsea. Andre Gomes, scarcely a typical Dyche player, started. Everton played 4-1-4-1, hardly Dyche’s normal shape. Their manager wore a tracksuit, not Dyche’s normal garb as he ditched the trademark dark suit, white shirt and tie. If it seemed an identity crisis for a man who has never seemed to waver in his idea of how football should be played or life led, however, it ended with a Dyche-esque victory forged in sweat and with Everton set to maintain their ever-present record in the top flight in the last seven decades. And even the loss of eight points after two deductions seems unlikely to alter that.