Koeman: I saw crisis in summer
RONALD KOEMAN feared his days as Everton boss were numbered during the summer holiday spent at his villa in Portugal.
Two major problems appeared on his immediate horizon – the Premier League fixtures for the new campaign and Everton’s inability to sign an adequate replacement for £90million striker Romelu Lukaku.
Koeman, speaking for the first time since his Goodison Park sacking on Monday, said: “I had Olivier Giroud in the building. He would have fitted perfectly but at the very last moment he decided he’d rather live in London and stay at Arsenal. That was really hard to swallow. You tell me, where you can get a better striker?
“Lukaku was so important for us, not just because of his goals. He had a certain way of playing as a striker. Strong, he could hold the ball, he always had an eye for the goal, he was fast. If things were not going well in a game, if we could not play the way we were used to, there was always the option to use the long ball towards him.
“All of a sudden we were missing such a player. With Nicolai Vlasic and Wayne Rooney we had attackers who want the ball at their feet. When you are struggling as a team with the build-up from the back, and we no longer had the option to kick it long, you know you have a problem.’’
Turning to the foibles of the Premier League computer, he said: “I was on holiday when I received the fixture list by email. I saw that five of our first nine games would be against clubs from last season’s top six – Chelsea, Tottenham, Man City, Man United and Arsenal.
“I said to myself, ‘Phew! That is not going to be an easy run, in particular with a Europa League run at the same time and a really early start with all the players because of the European games’. And most of all because I had lost my striker Lukaku.’’
Koeman spent £140m on new players in the summer. But he said: “We sold Lukaku for £90m. Our most expensive signing, the Icelander Gylfi Sigurdsso, cost half of that amount. Of course it is a lot of money but in England the football world has different figures.”
Koeman accepts that Everton fans were entitled to have big expectations. He said: “Absolutely, because this Everton was much more our own team than last season. But the strength of all the clubs in the Premier League makes it really difficult to climb out of a crisis, once you land in it.’’
At Southampton, and Benfica before that, Koeman was tactically astute. This season there were no tactical changes to boost his struggling Everton side.
Koeman said: “I have been racking my brain. Sometimes in football you just can’t get a grip on something. I was not doing anything different from what I have been doing in all the years before as a coach.”