Tom Davies has made just one cameo appearance in the first three games of the new Premier League season.
It seems an age since Tom Davies was strutting around the Goodison Park turf, his socks rolled down, his blonde locks flowing and the Manchester City defence choking on his dust as a little-known academy graduate clipped the ball past Claudio Bravo after a barnstorming run from the centre circle.
It was January 2017, Everton had just put four past a Pep Guardiola side and Davies appeared to have announced himself as Wayne Rooney’s spiritual successor on the blue half of Merseyside.
But that is about as good as it’s got for a Liverpool-born 21-year-old on the blue half of Stanley Park. Davies’ dazzling performance against Manchester City was supposed to herald the arrival of a future superstar but, two-and-a-half years on, he is yet to come close to fulfilling his undoubted potential.
Davies has featured for just 11 minutes in the opening three games of the 2019/20 Premier League season after slipping ever further down Marco Silva’s pecking order.
Yet, as the old saying goes, one man’s misery is another’s fortune. With summer signings Fabian Delph and Jean-Phillipe Gbamin ruled out, and with Andre Gomes and Morgan Schneiderlin toiling throughout Friday’s defeat to Aston Villa, has the door opened for Davies to breathe fresh life into his Everton career?
A player who clearly loves the club continues to divide supporters but he might never have a better chance to silence the doubters.
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