A BROKEN MAN
Marco is floored by sucker punches
SOAKED through and staring into space, Marco Silva looked a broken man by the end. The great unknown is whether he will get enough time to piece himself and his team back together again.
It will not be an easy repair job. This will have stung far more than most because of circumstances that had Everton winning 2-1 on 80 minutes and l osing 3- 2 at the whistle via a desperately soft penalty given by VAR and a stoppage-time own goal.
Gut punch doesn’t quite cover it. Not when Silva’s future was already a matter for debate and even if he could point to a performance that deserved more. Sadly for Everton and managers of any club, what you deserve usually counts for diddly squat when set against the cold currency of points.
And on that front, after a fifth defeat in six, Everton and Silva have precious little in hand. They are two points above the bottom three and really, that is all. Nothing else matters so much.
They can t al k about r ecent progress, about Brighton having only one shot on goal until their 80th- minute equaliser from the spot. They can talk about the weird VAR decision t hat made said equaliser, with Michael Keane penalised r et r ospectively f or stepping on Aaron Connolly’s ankle while they jostled for a high ball.
They can talk about their own shout for a penalty that wasn’t given when Richarlison and Martin Montoya came together early in the second half and they can talk about scoring two goals in an away game for the first time this season. They can talk about those things and they did. It changes nothing.
The only meaningful facts are that they trailed to a Pascal Gross free-kick, led through the combination of an Adam Webster own goal and a Dominic CalvertLewin finish, then were trodden into the muck by Neal Maupay’s penalty and Lucas Digne’s 94thminute own goal. Brutal.
Silva put a dignified face on it and summed it all up by saying: ‘It’s difficult for us to understand how some things happened today. We have to keep working even if there are some things you can’t understand.
‘ We were i n control at t hat moment (of the penalty awarded by VAR) and that moment completely changed the game. We should have controlled the game differently but that decision and why that decision happened was very difficult for us to understand. We should have had a clear penalty too.’
A clear penalty is pushing it, perhaps. But his grievance with the decision against Keane — spotted remotely by Lee Mason and fed to Andy Madley on the field — was understandable. Less so, is how Everton find themselves here.
Step back from the minutiae of the matches and you see a club that spent £100m this summer and have lost to Aston Villa, Bournemouth,
Sheffield United, Burnley and now Brighton. An over-simplification, possibly, but this is not the grand vision that the club saw following Sam Allardyce’s departure.
For Brighton, the win took them up to 12th, level on points with Tottenham, albeit after one more game. Graham Potter is doing well there, even if he was sensible enough to admit this win came against the grain.
‘I think we’ve played better and not got anything,’ he said. ‘Maybe we had a bit of luck, but those who have watched us will probably say we’ve earned a bit of luck. I’m delighted for the guys.
‘I feel for Everton because they put a lot into it. Did they deserve to lose? No, but that’s football.’
Brighton’s main moment of quality came with Gross’s opener from a free-kick, which came after
Andre Gomes fouled Connolly. From 20 yards Gross fizzed his shot past Jordan Pickford, but once more you had to wonder about the England goalkeeper, who was beaten on his side of the wall by a shot closer to the middle of the goal than the top corner.
Digne made the equaliser with an inswinging corner that Richarlison headed in via the side of Webster’s head before Calvert-Lewin scored an excellent second within two minutes of coming on.
He has five goals in his past five games in all competitions and Everton were in sight of a first away win since March.
I nstead, t hey conceded t hat questionable penalty and then saw a disappointing draw become a devastating l oss when Digne diverted a low cross from Leandro Trossard past his own keeper.