TURNING FAILURE INTO SUCCESS

After false dawns, Silva’s on brink of breakthrough

IT came up again on Saturday, the buzzword that is both everton’s enduring aim and their biggest shortcoming. It’s about the ‘consistency’, to the point that marco Silva’s use of the term has been just about the only constant in a consistently inconsistent campaign. He craves it, pines for it and finally, 32 games in, it feels as though he might just have it in sight after securing back-to-back wins for the first time since October. The key now is where club and manager go from here. The victories over chelsea and West Ham were brilliant — granted the latter were awful — but it is the next six games that will tell us everything we need to know about whether Silva has succeeded or failed in his first season at everton. Forgetting for a second the so-called race for seventh, it would be damning indeed on Silva in consideration of the money spent if everton were to go an entire season without a sustained run of form. and at this stage, they have not achieved it. The details on that front do not look clever. If you take their best unbroken sequence of points, going back to that October run, they managed nine points from three straights wins before a defeat. For some context, only the bottom three sides have generated less in their best runs and Burnley, in 17th, have five more. It is a startling illustration of everton’s undulations and it stands as a worry that Silva has not managed to get a grip on results until now. The consecutive wins aside, they have four clean sheets in five games, including a draw against Liverpool, and nine goals scored in that time — it is good form. The challenge is to turn good into formidable because to fall off once again, to deliver yet another false dawn from this position, would provide an unflattering picture of a campaign which has included positive aspects. He has created a good, young squad, never dropped beneath 12th and everton are only one point behind seventh and a likely spot in next season’s europa League. With six games remaining to hit that objective, it would be a good time for Silva’s team to finally prove they have the psychological strength to piece together the kind of run that will define a season.