Token EffortEverton · 2026/27

Everton · 2026/27 · Matchday Four · 12 September 2026

Matchday Four: Tottenham Hotspur (a)

Unashamedly written by a machine · The suffering is real

Back to the ground where last season died, against a side that spent three hundred million pounds over the summer and has still not scored. Everton went there with eighteen outfield players and a manager who had told them, in terms, that the club's record in that corner of north London was nothing to be proud of. They came home with a point, a clean sheet, the better of the chances and a centre-half the home crowd could not get past. The sixth instalment of the serial: a goalless draw that was better than it sounds, and worse than it might have been.

The Week Before

Last week's instalment ended with the Financial Times reporting that the owners were looking for someone to share the bill, and a manager who had never spoken to the man whose name is on it. This week the club said nothing further, which is itself a kind of statement; the only fresh word on the ownership came second-hand, with the i Paper describing a two-phase Friedkin plan of "stabilising the club" and then "pushing forward with investment" and insisting a minority sale is not the prelude to an exit. That is reported, not confirmed, and the Fans' Forum's open letter of ten days ago is still waiting for an answer that names names.

The players, meanwhile, had decided to say something themselves. Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall told the Liverpool Echo on Friday that he had "seen all of the stuff, all of the meltdowns and this and that, and in all honesty it annoyed me a bit". The argument was that the window's damage had been overstated: "We've got some really good players," he said, and, more hostage-to-fortune still, "our starting XI is top, like it's a European starting XI." The Echo's Joe Thomas, in his Saturday column, framed the trip as a chance to "banish the ghosts that haunted the club across June and July", and reminded readers that by the time this fixture came round in May the home defeat to Sunderland had already ended what was left of the European chance. What was on offer at Tottenham was something rarer: a frightened Spurs side needing a win to stay up, on the last day, in their own ground. Defeat, as the Guardian put it this week, "and they would have been relegated". Everton lost 1–0 and the chance to send a rival down went with it.

Seamus Coleman had a view on the sale that started the summer's fume. On the Stick to Football podcast he called Iliman Ndiaye "really good for us" and then said the quiet part: "I'm just surprised for someone so good… I'd have liked it to be for a bit more money." A man who captained the club through its worst years second-guessing the fee in public is not nothing, and the board noticed.

Moyes's Friday press conference, reported by the Echo and Grand Old Team, was chiefly about the two men he does not yet have. On Jack Grealish: "I think Jack is a special case, I think Jack is ready to play. I think Jack is probably a boy who needs the football more than he needs the training sometimes." He had "had a good week of training and is beginning to look ready to start", and on Saturday morning the Echo carried the manager's wider ambition for him: "I also want him to be a senior professional and a role model… We've got Tyrique and Tyler and if ever you are looking at somebody for how to play as a wide player, Jack Grealish would certainly be one of them." On Christian Nørgaard, signed on 5 August and still without a minute: "He's still unavailable. We're hoping we get him back maybe somewhere after the international break… I don't think we expected it to be as long as this." The free-agent striker market, which the BBC's gossip column had populated with Mauro Icardi and Anthony Martial before Everton sources played both down, got the Moyes shrug: "Of course we're looking to see if there's anything that could be of use, but I think to be at the level we're at, to make something that would make a big difference, it's not an easy thing to pluck from the transfer group." He said he had always preferred to work with "21 outfield players", cited Leicester's title as what a small, tight group can do, and did not mention that he currently has eighteen.

The opposition were in a stranger place. Roberto De Zerbi's Tottenham had lost 3–0 at Brentford, 0–2 at home to Newcastle and drawn 0–0 at Nottingham Forest without a shot on target: three league games, no goals, after a summer in which Tonali, Mateus Fernandes, Sávio and Jan Paul van Hecke arrived in a summer the Guardian costed at £300m. Richarlison, whose return to Everton collapsed on deadline day, has been left off Spurs' Premier League squad list altogether. De Zerbi told Hayters TV on Friday that the omission "has not been taken by the club. It has been a consequence of… that he has decided", that he had "spent time to convince him to stay", and that "I'm sorry because it could be different." A move to Turkey had also fallen through, which is the first time that strand, floated on the forum a fortnight ago and flagged here as unverified, has surfaced in a named outlet. Grand Old Team's trawl of a Spurs fans' forum found the fixture described as "easiest game of the season for us and the usual 3 points", with one dissenting voice "most worried about this one in terms of if we can score a goal or not". The dissenter had it right.

Team news, when it came, settled one of last week's open questions by removing it: Merlin Röhl was not in the squad at all, reported injured, and so Ainsley Maitland-Niles made his first start at right-back six days after scoring on his debut off the bench. Grealish was on the bench. Brennan Johnson, back at the club that sold him, kept his place, on the right this time, with George switched back to the left. Garner sat at the base of midfield with Armstrong and Dewsbury-Hall ahead of him. Barry, as ever, alone.

The Match: Tottenham 0–0 Everton

For twenty minutes it looked like the away day this serial has learned to dread. Spurs pressed high, moved the ball quickly and overloaded both Everton full-backs; Marmoush, Fernandes, Solanke and Sávio all had a run at a back four whose best player spent the evening, in the Echo's phrase, "putting his body on the line". Van Hecke's effort from a Robertson free-kick in the fifth minute, sent over from close range at the far post, would turn out to be the home side's best chance of the half. Branthwaite blocked a Tonali shot, then shots from Fernandes and Marmoush; Tarkowski dealt with the rest in the air. The visitors could not keep the ball. Moyes would say afterwards they "gave it away, turned it over more often than we have done recently", and that was generous. Spurs completed 643 passes at 93 per cent; Everton managed 381 at 84.

And yet the first shot on target in the game was Everton's. Garner's free-kick in first-half stoppage time was pushed round the post by Antonín Kinský, and when Fernandes finally put a tame effort straight at Pickford two minutes after the restart the South Stand greeted it with ironic cheers. That was the sound of the evening turning. Everton came out for the second half with more belief than the first had earned them, and George, who had blown hot and cold before the break, produced twenty minutes of surging runs down the left. One of them took him past Archie Gray, standing in for the injured Pedro Porro, and his cross found Barry at the far post; the header hit Kinský, who the Guardian judged "knew little about it", and flew wide. George's next effort hit Bentancur.

Then Tottenham's nerves did the rest. Kinský, under no pressure, rolled a pass straight to Dewsbury-Hall on the edge of the box; Dewsbury-Hall, with time and the goal in front of him, hit it straight back at him. Nine minutes later he did the hard part for someone else, sliding a low ball across for Johnson bursting into the area, and Johnson, with what would be the last touch of his afternoon against his former club, lifted it high. The Echo's rating said he "should have got on target"; the away end said something shorter. Grealish had come on for George by then and showed, in the Echo's words, "some nice touches" while still "feeling his way back"; Hackney and Jake O'Brien followed, the latter making his first appearance of the season at right-back as Maitland-Niles, on his weaker foot after three years in France, ran out of legs.

Spurs had one flicker, and Everton manufactured it themselves. Pickford's clearance off his right foot went straight to Maddison, on for the last quarter-hour after a shoulder injury; the ball was worked to Lucas Bergvall and his low drive was pushed away by the goalkeeper diving to his left, his hundredth Premier League clean sheet secured by a save that atoned for the error that required it. The last act was Branthwaite rising highest in a crowded box to head clear, taking the clattering he could see coming and getting up again. The Echo's Joe Thomas called it "a fitting moment to conclude the game". Darren England's whistle was met by two sounds at once: booing from the home seats, which had been emptying for some minutes, and a serenade from the corner where Everton's players had gone to applaud.

Post-Match

Moyes did not oversell it. "Was I happy with the performance? Not really, no," he said in his press conference, reported by the Echo. "I wanted much more from the team, but I told them about coming here — we've not had a great record here. It was only a couple months ago we stopped getting to Europe, probably, by not winning here as well, so I generally felt that we had to come in and show a bit more, we had to be resilient and tough. Tottenham were so good for 20 minutes. They put us under so much pressure and we found it difficult to escape from it. But look, we were worthy, we made a couple of chances, but we didn't play well enough today when we had the ball." Then the part he plainly wanted on the record: "The clean sheet was huge for the team and for everybody. There was a wee bit of Everton DNA. We have to find ways, we have a terrific goalkeeper, a back four that does well." And the caveat that the season will be judged on: "There'll be some games where we might have to play that way just to get ourselves through and pick up points. It wasn't the plan. We were forced into it by Tottenham." To Sky he put it more bluntly: "We were under the cosh from the first minute. But the players stuck at it."

Branthwaite, who topped the BBC readers' ratings, told the Echo's live blog that "they put us under pressure and we had to dig deep to stay in the game", and was filmed by Sky pretending, or possibly not pretending, to be unhappy that the broadcaster's player-of-the-match award had gone to the man beside him. Vitalii Mykolenko, who received it, said something that the board will want to remember or hold against him depending on how October goes: "This group is so good. A few weeks ago I said in an interview, this is probably the best group ever I've seen in Everton since I came."

The Echo's Chris Beesley gave 8s to Branthwaite and Mykolenko and 7s to Pickford, Maitland-Niles, Tarkowski, Garner, George and all three substitutes; Armstrong, Dewsbury-Hall and Barry got 6, Johnson a 5. The BBC's Katharine Sharpe recorded Pickford as the nineteenth goalkeeper to reach a hundred Premier League clean sheets. Over on the other bench, De Zerbi was explaining a full-time exchange with his substitute Mathys Tel, "the striker can't play with the shoulder on the goal… I love Mathys as a player, as a guy, that is not a problem", and Jamie Redknapp on Sky was explaining Spurs: "After spending £300m, I didn't think there would be a problem scoring goals. But to not score in six hours of football is absolutely diabolical." The Guardian's David Hytner opened his report with the question "Is it too early for a Tottenham crisis?" and answered it himself: "it is never too early for a Tottenham crisis." Four league games without a goal has not happened to Spurs in their history. Everton, Hytner wrote, "probably deserved to win".

The Fans' Verdict

The People's Forum, which has seen enough Everton trips to north London to know how they usually end, went into the evening with the thread title "Seriously hope we beat Spurs today" and the honest appendix that "there's just something about Spurs that makes us collectively shit ourselves". Team news did not help. Röhl's absence from the whole squad, not just the eleven, set off the first speculation of the day, and the sight of Johnson starting with Grealish on the bench drew a groan that the board had already rehearsed during the week in a thread devoted to the two men it wanted to see, Hackney and Grealish, as "the two most comfortable players on the bench".

The first twenty minutes were watched through fingers. "Men vs boys against a team with no confidence," said one post, and a reply corrected the scale: against a team that had spent close to half a billion. By half-time the board had talked itself down from panic to pragmatism, on the reasonable grounds that Spurs had not scored all season and a scruffy 0–0 hurt them more; by full-time it had reached the verdict it usually reaches after a scoreless away draw at a club it dislikes, which is that "you probably take the point and clean sheet but God, that was uninspiring". The game's own review thread had a title that cannot be printed here in full but described both the game and the opposition with the same adjective. Someone compared the spectacle to a football video game from 2004, and asked whether the problem was the football or their age.

Where the board agreed: Branthwaite, whose man-of-the-match thread went up while the match was still going and was not argued with, and Maitland-Niles, "shaky" early and "improved and improved", now filed as a proper right-back rather than an emergency. Where it split: the decision to take George off at 65 minutes, which one camp read as an incomprehensible removal of "the most dangerous outlet all season" and the other as a manager resting his best legs for Wednesday's cup tie; and Johnson, about whom the board's question was not whether he played badly but what, in the current system, he is for. The one-striker problem got no gentler. The frustration this week was less with Barry than with the arithmetic around him: there is nobody to take him off for, and a growing view that he is a twenty-minute weapon against tired defenders being asked to do ninety alone. The loudest single post-match demand was for Hackney to start; the fact that he did come on, with a quarter of an hour left, did not much reduce it.

The Moyes barometer held for a fourth week. Individual calls were needled, the subs especially, but there is no strand of the board that wants him gone, and the point was accepted as the kind of thing he was brought back to deliver. The week's heaviest thread, though, was not about the football at all. It concerned an off-the-record briefing that Angus Kinnear gave on Tuesday to some supporter groups and not others, which Goodison News reported as a request "some accepted" and "many were said to have declined". The board's view was close to unanimous and can be summarised as: if you are telling some fans, tell all of them, and if the message is that there is no money, say so in the programme notes. "Smoke and mirrors," ran one reply. "There is no cash." The Friedkin silence has become a theme in its own right, independent of any single report: the board has noticed that nobody can find a direct quote from Dan Friedkin about anything, that he has never spoken to the manager, and that the contrast with the previous chairman, who never stopped talking, is not the consolation it once looked. There was no protest talk and no satisfaction poll this week; the temperature is read from tone, and the tone is wearied rather than angry. The Richarlison saga was put to bed with a shrug, and one post noted the evening's real irony: both sides could have done with him, and he was in neither squad.

Themes Carried Forward

Ownership, still the top theme, and still without a club voice. Nine days after the Financial Times reported a stake-sale process, the club has issued nothing on the record. What it has done, reportedly, is send the chief executive to brief selected supporter groups in private, which has annoyed the groups left out more than it has reassured the groups let in. The i Paper's account of a two-phase plan is reported and unconfirmed. The next instalment inherits the same question as the last two: when does someone with the Friedkin name say something in public, and about what?

The Moyes barometer: four weeks rising, now level. Unbeaten, a point at a ground he called out in advance, and a clean sheet he described as "huge". In his own telling the run-in that ended at Tottenham last May is what cost Everton Europe, and he did not let the players forget it. The Echo puts the decisive blow a week earlier, at home to Sunderland; what the Spurs game actually cost was the chance to relegate them, which is the memory the away end was carrying. The cost is a performance he himself refused to call good, and a possession share that would have been alarming against a side that could finish. The next test is whether "some games where we might have to play that way" becomes most games.

Branthwaite is now a storyline, not a given. Four starts from four after a season lost to injury; the Echo's Joe Thomas wrote that "no player has a greater impact on the potential of this Blues team" and that hopes of an England recall this month are tempered by fear of his workload. The board agrees, for once with the press. His fitness is the single point of failure in a defence that has conceded three in four.

Pickford at a hundred. The nineteenth goalkeeper to a century of Premier League clean sheets, in the same game in which he nearly gave away the goal that would have denied him it. Villain and hero within a minute, which is the job.

The one-striker autumn, week three. Barry's header at the far post was Everton's best chance and it hit the goalkeeper; the two chances that should have won the game fell to a midfielder and a winger. The free-agent market has been looked at and, in the manager's words, is "not an easy thing to pluck from". Icardi and Martial were floated and played down within the same news cycle. January is sixteen weeks away, and Braiden Graham remains the bench's only alternative.

Grealish: 25 minutes, "ready to start", not started. Two cameos in two league games, both liked; a manager saying on Friday that "Jack is ready to play" and then keeping him back for the last twenty-five minutes on Saturday. Wednesday's cup tie is the obvious place to give him an hour. Moyes also wants him to be "a senior professional and a role model" for George and Dibling; the second of those names has yet to start a league game this season.

Right-back: answered, for now, by absence. Maitland-Niles has gone from emergency signing to a debut goal and a first start inside a fortnight; O'Brien's first appearance of the season came in the same position, five days after the Prime Minister, an Evertonian, had opined on where he should play. Röhl's injury is reported, not confirmed, and its length unknown. The experiment thread of last week has closed itself.

The youth spine, mixed. George: back on the left after claiming the right a week ago, twenty good minutes and a cross that should have produced a goal, then off. Armstrong: a 6, penalised early for a challenge on Marmoush and then clattered himself, and a contract offer that has still not appeared, though talks are now reported to be planned. Hackney: on for the last quarter-hour, on the right, defending; the board's demand that he start is not going away. Nørgaard: five and a half weeks, no minutes, "after the international break" at the earliest.

Away form, the quiet stat. Seven league games on the road without a win, the last at Newcastle in February. Two of those seven are this season's draws, both creditable; five are last season's collapse. The next away trip is not until after the break.

The Spurs sidebar. A club that spent £300m, has not scored in four league games for the first time in its history, booed its own side off and had its head coach explaining a touchline row with a substitute. Richarlison's exile is now confirmed from De Zerbi's own mouth, including the Turkish move that never happened. Everton's part in all this was to be the visitor on the day the ground recorded its first goalless league draw, which is not nothing.

The ledger. Seventh with six points, unbeaten, six clubs still to play this round; the preview's prediction of eleventh looks more sensible every week and is still four places out. Hull City, tipped here for relegation, drew 2–2 at Chelsea and are third. Ipswich, next week's visitors, are eighth. Manchester United, eleventh last week, still have Manchester City to play this round.

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