Everton have won four of their last five Premier League games and look set to end the campaign on a high.
Jamie Carragher has told Super Sunday on Sky Sports (broadcast on 22/4; 15:39) that Marco Silva has produced the brilliant end to the season at Everton that he potentially needed after a somewhat lacklustre campaign at Goodison Park.
The Toffees have been superb in recent weeks, beating Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United in their last five fixtures. The 4-0 win against the latter on Sunday was the kind of performance that could go down as a defining moment in Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s tenure at Old Trafford.
Their form has left Everton seventh in the table with three games remaining. Winning that best of the rest table may arguably be around par for the Toffees. And Carragher suggested that Silva has needed these recent wins, but insisted that something has clearly clicked in regards to the style of play on show.
“I thought Everton were outstanding. It’s easy to say today. What Marco Silva’s done in the second-half of the season, he needed big results before the end of the season. I’m not saying his job was on the line, but when they lost to Millwall in the cup,” he told Sky Sports.
“For any Everton manager coming into the club, that’s how Everton play. Forget how you want to play, what you want to do. I sometimes think that certain teams have certain ways of playing. When you go to Goodison as an opposition player, you’ve got to think this is going to be a tough game. The crowd’s hostile, it’s a tight pitch, people are getting after you, they’re playing the counter attack, there’s pace, there’s energy.
“And that’s what we’ve seen going back to the Merseyside derby even though they never won that game, the atmosphere in the stadium that day. You’ve got the Arsenal game, Chelsea game and now that one. This has been a brilliant end to the season for Marco Silva and he needed it badly.”
In fairness to Silva, it was always going to be a challenging year given that he arrived looking to change the style of play substantially following Sam Allardyce’s tenure on Merseyside.
He is clearly not blameless for some of the disappointments of this season. But perhaps this recent run of form is an indication of how much potential the club could have under him, especially with another summer transfer window just around the corner.
Everton will be hoping to make it five wins from six when they take on Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park this Saturday.
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