Everton V Bolton Preview

Everton go into Wednesday’s game with Bolton looking to bounce back from Saturdays poor result at Blackpool. Bolton are 5 places, albeit one point ahead of us and frankly it’s a game we need to win if we really have aspirations in playing in Europe at the end of   the season. It’s a sign of how bad the league is this year and how early it still is that Bolton, have only won 3 games yet are 6^th – but that’s the nature of the league this season, more games are close and being decided by garbage refereeing decisions than ever before, save for the teams with that little bit of quality in and around the oppositions penalty box and on the whole, that hasn’t been us.

So the usual 4-5-1 system it’ll be then, especially given how bad we were when we went 4-4-2 on Saturday, Fellaini will surely come into the midfield when he is fit but given that is still a week or so away perhaps it could be a chance for Rodwell to play in an advanced role with Arteta sitting, not literally, I mean getting a lot of the ball and doing simple passes to the full backs after faking to switch it to the wingers thing they all seem to do, in front of the back four. Hetinga is clearly a defender that can’t/won’t play in the holding midfield role at the moment. Yakubu has been better of late up front and seems all set to do the same again, though given his fitness concerns earlier in the season, it will be interesting to see the level of energy he can muster, especially as the game wears on.

Bolton for their part are the proverbial ‘handful’ up front, Davies and the previously last Elmander seem to be linking up well and with Lee and Petrov out wide, they look to get plenty of crosses in. That said though, they’ve Steinsson  and Robinson, who might rival Kyriagos, don’t check the spelling for the biggest yard dog seen at Goodison all season playing full backs and Zat Knight playing centre half, so we’ve half a chance.

Owen Coyle will presumably still be wearing his shorts pulled up even though it’ll be freezing and they’ll have about 50 fans at the match, apart from that it’s not that easy to get that much worked up about them…ahhh for the Halcyon days of Big and Little Sam…

This game marks a quarter of the way through the season and a return of three wins at this point, in spite of one of them coming against Paul O’Gradys Norweigan-allstars, isn’t good enough especially thinking back to pre-season when a run at the Champions league didn’t seem beyond the realms of possibility.

A big game then, especially when given three of our next six games are against sides in the top 4 – hopefully we can start getting back to the great football we were playing at times last season and our striker(s) start putting away a few chances, as its high time we started pushing further up the league at very least challenging for the top 6 with the ability we have in this squad.

Oh and for Christ’s sake Everton, we must have had 90 corners this season, let’s put one into the box eh?

Up the Toffee’s

Henno05