Mr Silva named an unchanged team for the third week in a row as it looks as if, at least for now, the boss has found his strongest eleven. That strongest eleven dominated the ball in the first half as we looked typically fluid going forward with Bernard and Richarlison linking up multiple times to cause some danger on Matt Ryan’s goal with the initial breakthrough coming in the 26th minute, ironically from a devasting counter attack from a Brighton corner.
However in a world of karma, we couldn’t gain from a corner without giving back, and a half-asleep backline couldn’t prevent the eight-foot tall Lewis Dunk from bagging an equaliser against the run of play.
The second half of the game though was, in my most humble opinion, the best half of football an Everton side has played since the 4-0 thrashing of City 2 years ago. Every attack looked deadly and it was simply a joy to watch André Gomes, Gylfi Sigurdsson and Richarlison systematically tear apart Brighton bit by bit.
We got our rewards as Richarlison put in his best performance at striker yet, as even up against Dunk and Duffy, he dominated physically whenever the ball was in the Brighton half.
It’s the performance that’s been coming for a while. Finally we dominated a team and made it count. Far too many times we’d been the better team but failed to get anything out of the game, this time though, there was ruthless efficiency.
