Sunday’s Premier League fixture between Everton and Manchester United certainly got tongues wagging across football over the Easter Weekend.
Welcoming Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s side to Goodison Park, Everton swept away Fulham disappointment and put in one of the best performances of the season to register a comfortable 4-0 victory with goals coming from Richarlison, Gylfi Sigurdsson, Lucas Digne and Theo Walcott.
With most pundits choosing to focus on how bad United were on the day, with Gary Neville amusingly having a mini breakdown on Sky, credit where it’s due, Jamie Carragher spent longer focusing on our actual performance as he appeared on the Super Sunday broadcast (22/4 – 15.40).
“I thought Everton were outstanding. It’s easy to say today. What Marco Silva’s done in the second-half of the season, he needed big results before the end of the season. I’m not saying his job was on the line, but when they lost to Millwall in the cup. For any Everton manager coming into the club, that’s how Everton play. Forget how you want to play, what you want to do. I sometimes think that certain teams have certain ways of playing. When you go to Goodison as an opposition player, you’ve got to think this is going to be a tough game. The crowd’s hostile, it’s a tight pitch, people are getting after you, they’re playing the counter attack, there’s pace, there’s energy. And that’s what we’ve seen going back to the Merseyside derby even though they never won that game, the atmosphere in the stadium that day. You’ve got the Arsenal game, Chelsea game and now that one. This has been a brilliant end to the season for Marco Silva and he needed it badly.”
High praise indeed and absolutely spot on. Thankfully our form under manager Marco Silva has turned nicely in our favour in recent weeks and it has helped offset a lot of disappointment from how the wheels fell off for a period. Victories over Chelsea, Arsenal and now United shows a strong end to the campaign and it feels like things have clicked again (Fulham aside) and momentum could be key heading into the next campaign.