The current campaign is not even over yet, but reports in O Jogo, via Sport Witness, suggest Marco Silva has already laid out preliminary plans for how his first-team will look next season.
The report suggests Maarten Stekelenburg is on his way out, and in his place as Jordan Pickford’s number two will be youth star Joao Virginia, hot off his second Premier League 2 title in a row.
One of Virginia’s final acts as an Arsenal ace was to clinch the junior top-flight title last season, but with chances of earning a senior promotion slim in North London, he left the Emirates and moved to Merseyside.
Under David Unsworth, Virginia has gone on to make a further twelve PL2 appearances, in which he has kept nine clean sheets, and earned his maiden U21 international call-up for Portugal by Rui Jorge in October, where he also kept the opposition at bay.
O Jogo also note that both Silva and Marcel Brands were in the Goodison stands for his most recent outing for the Toffees – when we clinched the 2018/19 PL2 title against Brighton – and include an interview with the 19-year-old, where he claims the boss and goalkeeper coach Hugo Oliveira regularly keep tabs on his progress.
“Silva has enjoyed my evolution and is always following me, just like Hugo Oliveira,” he said. “They both talk a lot to me, and one of the main developments I had was in consistency. An example of this was, in eleven games, to have nine clean sheets.”
Virginia went on to add: “I now want to make my debut in the Premier League.”
When O Jogo’s report was then shared on Reddit, this is what some Everton fans had to say…
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