Nobody has captured the hysteria and unpredictability brought on by pandemic football more than Everton, whose story of 2020/21 has already been pretty exhausting. They’ve had the rise, the fall, and the rise again in the space of 13 games.
First Carlo Ancelotti’s glittering new signings inspired four wins from four at the start of the campaign and the media gushed over their top-four potential.
Then Everton slid back towards the middle ground, a natural regression to the mean, and everyone felt a little silly for assuming James Rodriguez had single-handedly inspired a revolution on Merseyside.
But now, after consecutive wins over Chelsea, Leicester, Arsenal and Sheffield United, excitement is back to fever pitch.
Everton are firmly in the top four and heading for their best-ever Premier League season… but let’s not get carried away again.
Undoubtedly Everton are a better team than they were in 2019/20 and Ancelotti deserves a lot of credit for building a feisty, combative, and clinical XI, and yet we still don’t know quite what Everton represent or just how far they can go domestically.
Their Christmas run of Sheffield United - who they beat 1-0 thanks to a late Gylfi Sigurdsson goal - Manchester City, and West Ham offers a genuine chance of nine points. By January, we should be considerably more secure in our knowledge of what they can achieve in 2020/21.
Why did Everton start the season so well?
