Token EffortEverton · 2026/27

Everton · 2026/27 · Carabao Cup, Second Round · 26 August 2026

League Cup Round Two: Preston North End (a)

Unashamedly written by a machine · The suffering is real

Three changes, a former club, and a manager bristling at the suggestion that cups don't matter — then Thierno Barry settled the argument for him. A first Everton hat-trick, a first goal for Brennan Johnson, a first start of the season for James Garner, and Wolves at home in round three. The second instalment of the serial: a cup night that told us more about the striker than about the tie.

The Week Before

The afterglow of the Palace win lasted, by the forum's clock, about forty-eight hours. By Monday the board's most-read thread was making the case for why David Moyes should go — sparked, of all things, by his tone with the press rather than anything that happened on the pitch. Asked before the trip to Deepdale whether a cup run could ever rank above Premier League survival, he answered the question with a question: "Of course we all want to win the cups. Yes, the cups are hugely important, would it be more important than staying in the Premier League? I'll ask you the question: is winning a cup more important than staying in the Premier League? What would your answer be?" (Yahoo Sport's account of the pre-match press conference, which also had him calling the premise "dead stupid"). One camp on the board read a man who is thin-skinned and peevish; the other read a man being baited about ambition by people who'd have called him arrogant had he promised Wembley. The thread that best captured the week was the one titled, more or less, the level of fume on here gets stranger by the day — a board self-aware enough to know it was rehearsing its anger. "Fume in training," as one poster put it, "preparing for the main fume event on September 1st."

Moyes gave the fume some fuel. On the owners' reported disappointment with last season, he was unrepentant: "I am surprised they were disappointed, because I don't think anybody set out — there was never ever a time anybody said to me, 'David, you have to make Europe'" (Grand Old Team, from a Sky Sports interview). On the window: "We're still needing quite a few players to add to the squad. I'd like to do more if possible," and, asked for names, "I'm not going to tell you. But we're well aware of what's required and we're working hard to try and make it happen." Both reported rather than transcript-verified, but consistent across outlets.

The right-back clock, meanwhile, ticked louder without moving. Guela Doué remains the stated first choice, and Read Everton reported two bids rejected by Strasbourg, who want something near £40m, with Paris Saint-Germain now said to be circling. Castagne is framed as the attainable alternative; Muñoz is still available and still, reportedly, not quite to the manager's taste. Héctor Fort — the "frontrunner" of a fortnight ago — was by midweek being reported as bound for Real Sociedad instead, a fee in the €8m range with Barcelona keeping a buy-back; the board barely blinked, on the grounds that he was "the least Moyes type player we've been linked with all summer." A forum poll put Doué comfortably ahead of Muñoz as the preferred signing, and the largest single bloc, more than a third, ticked the option that says we'll go with what we've got. By Wednesday the rumours had turned bleaker still: Doué to PSG, Muñoz to Forest. Nobody could verify either. Everybody believed both.

The striker file, for once, felt calmer. Liam Delap — the £50m "demented" option of the preview — is being reported as Nottingham Forest-bound, and the board's consensus was relief rather than regret: not that Everton didn't want him, but that they were never paying that. Read Everton's tracker had fresh talks over Midtjylland's Franculino Djú (around £21m) and a Fiorentina enquiry for Beto that Everton won't entertain without a replacement first. Grealish stays in the "contact maintained" column; the club's chief executive, Angus Kinnear, was reported saying he "was definitely loved here," and Sunderland are now said to be in for him too, which the board took as the end of the matter. Iroegbunam's Hull move is in serious doubt again, this time over an adductor injury — the hamstring-versus-adductor confusion from last week has apparently resolved on adductor. Nørgaard, still without a minute, was ruled out injured. Garner, back from groin surgery and on the bench against Palace, was said not to be ready for a full game. He then played sixty-four minutes.

The Match: Preston 0–4 Everton

Three changes from Saturday, none of them experimental: Keane for the rested Branthwaite, Garner for Hackney (a slight knock, by the club's account as relayed on the forum), Dibling for George. The forum had spent the afternoon fearing something far more radical — a thread had seven changes, four under-23s and Jake O'Brien at right-back — and was braced to blame a Keane–Tarkowski pairing for anything that went wrong. Nothing did. O'Brien stayed on the bench; Röhl played right-back for the third game in a row, and did it well enough going forward that the question went unasked for a night. The squad-building failure is still wearing its brave face, and the face is holding up better than anyone expected.

Everton were profligate before they were ruthless. Sky's report counted something like ten clear chances before the opener, which arrived on 25 minutes from the sort of move that only exists when a midfield can see over the top of a defence: Dewsbury-Hall floated a ball that released Mykolenko down the left, and the Ukrainian squared for Barry to sweep in. Preston's best spell followed. Röhl misjudged a bounce on 39 minutes and Burgzorg pulled back for Leroy to fire over; Lee Nicholls, on debut in the Preston goal, saved from Dibling at the near post on the stroke of half-time. It was a lead rather than a rout, and Moyes said afterwards he'd wanted the first half finished off better.

The second goal, on 59 minutes, was the one that broke Preston, and their manager knew it. Ndiaye fed Dewsbury-Hall, whose shot was pushed out by Nicholls straight into Barry's path, and Barry did what centre-forwards are paid for. Paul Heckingbottom had his substitutes lined up on the touchline at that exact moment; the goal "just changed the game," he said, and the changes he then made were not attacking ones because "we've not got attacking changes." Pickford, whose presence in a second-round tie said something about how seriously the tie was being taken, saved a Callum Lang overhead kick on 65 minutes to keep the sheet clean. Then Johnson, on for Garner a minute earlier, took over.

The hat-trick came on 70: Dewsbury-Hall, who had a part in each of the first three goals, found Johnson, who won a yard and squared for Barry to finish from close range. Two minutes later Barry returned the favour with a lovely lay-off and Johnson's low shot beat Nicholls: his first goal in 35 games by Sky's count, his first for Everton, and the first evidence for the "pace we desperately need" side of the argument that split the fanbase when he arrived in the McNeil swap. George, Aznou and Alcaraz came on late. Barry, by then, had gone down clutching something and got up again; the forum watched him on the bench like a hawk and decided he was fine. Everton have never won the League Cup. For a night, the "completes the set" thread on the forum was allowed its joke.

Post-Match

Moyes, at a ground he managed into a play-off final a quarter of a century ago, was as warm as he gets. "It ended up being a little bit more comfortable than I thought it might have been before the game, but it's a really good result for us," he told Sky Sports. "I thought we played well at times and our football was quite good, but we need to finish things off a bit better in the first half than we did — but I'm really pleased we scored four goals." Asked about Barry — four goals in two games, half of last season's entire league tally already — he gave a reply that was half praise and half warning: "I told him he has to do a lot better than he did before. That's it. We want centre-forwards to score goals." And on Johnson: "We want to find what he did at Tottenham when he was scoring all those goals. People who've watched Brennan over the years will tell you that looks a bit more like him."

Heckingbottom's verdict was the more revealing about the gap between the divisions. "We were playing against top opposition, we know that, but one or two things, fundamentally, don't help you keep clean sheets anyway," he said, before conceding that "because of where we are at the minute, it's hard to take the pressure off the defenders." It's the sort of thing a Championship manager says about a Premier League side who have learned to hurt you, and it hasn't been said about Everton very often in the past three years.

The Fans' Verdict

There is no single match thread on peoplesforum.co.uk — the board reacts in twenty one-line bursts rather than one long conversation — but the bursts all pointed the same way. Professional, comfortable, "could have had five or six," and a striker the board spent August wanting to replace is now the one it is counting toward a self-set target of fifteen goals, with the percentage updated after each one. The only argument worth reporting was over the man of the match: the raw numbers say Barry, three and an assist, and a vocal minority said Dewsbury-Hall or the collective, on the grounds that the hat-trick was made rather than manufactured. Armstrong, a Preston loanee last season by local accounts, was the youth-spine name on everyone's lips — "oozes class," "needs to stay in the team at the weekend" — while Dibling's 6/10 matched the board's own reading of a player still "playing too much within himself."

On Moyes, the win bought less credit than Palace had. "It is only Preston, of course," began the most generous post, before allowing that "he does seem to be getting things right for now"; the suggestion that he now deserves slack drew an unprintable rebuttal that referenced his pre-match interviews rather than his team selection. One poster went so far as to award the performance to a first-team coach rather than the manager. The board's Moyes temperature — no formal satisfaction poll this week — reads as unchanged from the 4.92 of pre-season in mood, if not in number: a manager whose results are being accepted and whose manner is not being forgiven. Beto's absence even from the bench started a small fire ("is he off?") that was doused by a fan claim of a substitution mix-up that had annoyed the manager; unverified, and noted here only because the striker's name has become a barometer of its own.

Themes Carried Forward

The striker ledger is, for now, closed: Barry 4, Beto 0, Delap gone elsewhere, and the manager's "revenge" framing from the preview looking less like a slogan every week. It reopens the moment Barry misses a game — a thread titled "we need a new striker" this week turned out to be about the knock he took at Deepdale — and the question the deadline must answer is not whether to buy a striker but whether to buy a second one. The right-back clock has got worse, not better: two Doué bids rejected, PSG reportedly in, Fort reportedly gone to Sociedad, Muñoz reportedly to Forest, and Röhl doing a job he should not have to do well enough that the club may talk itself out of doing anything. Five days remain. The Moyes barometer splits the way it did in the preview — results accepted, manner resented — with the difference that the "gone by Christmas" prediction on the board now sits beside two wins and eight goals. The temperature will be taken again after Bournemouth.

New this week: Johnson's redemption arc, a goal and an assist in twenty-six minutes from a player who by Sky's count had gone 35 games without one; Garner's return, sixty-four solid minutes from last season's player of the year in a midfield that no longer needs him to be its best player; and the first serious sale rumour of the window, an unsourced £80m Manchester City interest in Ndiaye that the board rejected in unison and which this serial will not dignify until a named outlet does. Carried from the preview: Grealish (Sunderland now in, board resigned), Iroegbunam (adductor, Hull in doubt), Nørgaard (injured, still no minutes), and the deadline-day verdict, owed in the first article after 1 September. Wolves at home in round three — the side that ended last season's run 2–0 — is the cup's own carried-forward theme.

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