Rookie Jarrad is Blues’ fall-guy, but the entire team should take rap
JARRAD BRANTHWAITE will probably have a long and successful career – but he will not want to look back on his debut.
The 18-year-old defender’s first game for Everton will be remembered for all the wrong reasons. While the teenager’s part in his team’s atrocious display is the stand-out feature, none of Carlo Ancelotti’s players can take too much pride from this debacle.
Make no mistake, Wolves could – and should – have won this game by a much more comprehensive margin.
Had they walked off 6-0 winners it would not have been a big surprise as they mauled the visitors.
They have their mojo back after successive defeats to Arsenal and Sheffield United dented their march towards a potential Champions League spot.
Wolves opened the scoring just before half time with a Raul Jimenez penalty. By that
point only several interventions by Everton keeper Jordan Pickford had kept the game goalless.
That changed when Lucas Digne sent Daniel Podence sprawling and Jimenez made no mistake from the spot.
He put Pickford on his knees going one way and fired the ball in the opposite direction.
Then Branthwaite (below, challenging Adam Traore) took centre stage less than a minute after the break to play his part in the goal that effectively killed off Everton’s chances of getting anything.
On as a half-time replacement for Leighton Baines, he fouled Pedro Neto while making an awkward challenge and when Neto curled the resulting free-kick across, the youngster lost the impressive Leander Dendoncker, who steamed past him and got the sweetest of touches to glance his header into the far corner.
After that, Everton seemed to offer very little resistance.
Pickford was lucky to escape when he fumbled a Daniel Podence shot and just managed to recover and scramble the ball back off the line.
Diogo Jota should have scored in a one-on-one with the keeper, but got a bad first touch.
Jota made amends in the 74th minute when he raced on to a brilliant 60-yard pass from Ruben Neves.
He took the ball on his chest and rifled home with his left foot before celebrating with his team-mates ( far left). It was all over and Wolves could afford the luxury of seeing Adama Traore miss an open goal by blasting the ball against the bar from six yards out.
That Pickford emerged as Everton’s star man despite shipping three goals perhaps says it all about just how horribly wrong this went for the visitors.
With only three minutes gone, the England keeper needed every last inch of his six foot frame to get to a low shot from Podence which was creeping towards the far corner of his goal.
He was again forced to intervene when Podence fired in a low shot which Pickford pushed around for a corner.
Then Jimenez tried an audacious piece of trickery. Back to goal, he teed it up off his foot, then onto his knee before getting an overhead kick on target but not far enough away from the keeper.
Ancelotti (right) could see his team were struggling to keep Wolves out, though Dominic Calvert-Lewin had forced home keeper Rui Patricio into action when he beat away his angled low shot early on.