Everton are still in a fight against relegation but Gary Neville believes Burnley boss Sean Dyche has inadvertently invigorated this Toffees side.
Everton’s dreadful season has left them looking nervously over their shoulder with relegation to the Championship a major threat.
Many Toffees fans were absolutely fearing the worst after losing 3-2 at Burnley last week.
Some boiled the fight for survival down to Everton v Burnley, and for Frank Lampard’s men to throw away a 2-1 lead and lose 3-2 was catastrophic.
With Everton hosting Manchester United and Burnley heading to Norwich City over the weekend, it looked like a terrible situation for the Toffees.
However, Everton produced a rousing display to beat United 1-0 thanks to Anthony Gordon’s deflected strike.
Just over 24 hours later, Burnley squandered that game against Norwich, falling to a meek 2-0 defeat in East Anglia.
That now means Everton are in the box seat to survive right now, with the pressure somewhat easing on Lampard after that victory.
This is a huge turn especially given some rather bold comments from Burnley boss Sean Dyche last week.
After beating the Toffees, Dyche claimed the told his players that Everton simply don’t know how to win a game away from home.
That sparked a fightback from Burnley but will have understandably left Everton feeling somewhat disrespected.
Dyche may be feeling a little silly after that flip of results over the weekend.
Pundit Gary Neville has now offered his take on his own podcast, believing that Dyche’s comments were ‘harsh’ and ‘on the edge of disrespectful’.
Neville thinks Lampard and his players won’t have liked Dyche’s comments at all whilst praising Lampard for claiming a huge win in his battle against relegation.
“First thing to say is that I didn’t see the Everton v Burnley game, but what I did see is the interviews on social media the day after from Sean Dyche,” said Neville. “They actually made a bit of an impact on me. I thought… that’s harsh, to say that publicly, that he’d said to his players at half time ‘I don’t think this team knows how to win a game’, or something along those lines.”
“Maybe on the edge of disrespectful but certainly ramping up the mind games, turning the heat up on Frank Lampard. I thought ‘Frank Lampard won’t like that’, and you’d like to think the Everton players wouldn’t like that because it was a pretty harsh thing to hear for me.”
“So for Everton to do what they did – and I don’t think they played particularly well at all, I don’t think they had to – but for them to get that win and get that response, and then to see Burnley lose at Norwich, it’s swung in three or four days and it’s a massive swing for Everton.”
“Well done to Frank Lampard because I think he was on the edge, really on the edge,” he added.
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