Everton (Soccer Team)

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      Everton's Women Are 'Not Shy About Being Ambitious'

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      A series of changes, big and small, has a strengthened Everton believing it can hold its own with deep-pocketed rivals in England’s Women’s Super League.LIVERPOOL, England — Some of the changes have been small, so small as to be imperceptible, at least from the outside. This summer, for the first time, Everton hired someone specifically to take care of the uniforms of its women’s team. It is the sort of thing that serves as a reminder that, in women’s soccer, many little battles are still being won.Those small changes, though, still have an impact; they still offer a marginal gain. The laundry will no longer have to be done by another staff member, someone who is supposed to be analyzing video or planning coaching sessions, or even by the players themselves. All that time saved can now be put to proper use. Everything can be just a little bit better.And some of the changes have been considerable, like the nine new players who have joined Everton squad over the last few months. There is Toni Duggan, an experienced England international, the German defender Leonie Maier, the Italian midfielder Aurora Galli, and three players signed from Rosengard, Sweden’s champion-in-waiting, dubbed the Swedish House Mafia by their new teammates.The most significant change, though, at least as far as the club’s coach, Willie Kirk, is concerned, is the one that is hardest to describe. It struck him, most clearly, while away with his team on a preseason camp in Scotland last month. Something, he could tell, had clicked.Everton’s coach, Willie Kirk, has found it easier, and cheaper, to close the gap between midtable and the top than his men’s counterparts.Catherine Ivill/Getty Images“Maybe it is self-belief,” he said, trying to put his finger on it. “Maybe it is the feeling of watching another player walk through the doors and thinking: Yep, that’s another quality signing. Maybe it is knowing that not one player can be sure they’re starting in the next game, and that competition driving standards.”Kirk may not be able to name it, not precisely, but he is happy to talk about it. The first time Izzy Christiansen, the club’s vastly experienced midfielder, sat down with Kirk — in the winter of 2019 — her abiding impression was of a coach who had absolutely “no fluff,” she said. He did not try to give her the hard sell as to why she should sign with Everton.“There wasn’t a pitch,” Christiansen said. He simply bought her a coffee — “That’s one way to persuade me to join a club,” she said — and explained how he saw her as a player, what he thought she would bring to the team, and what he, and his club, were trying to do. “It was matter-of-fact,” she said.He is exactly the same when it comes to his intentions for his team. “We are not shy about being ambitious,” Kirk said.It is telling that, when asked if the plan for the season is to challenge the Big Three of England’s Women’s Super League — Chelsea, Manchester City and Arsenal — when the season opens on Saturday, Christiansen recalibrated the question. “That’s what we intend to do,” she said. “To compete, and to surpass. We want to take the club back into the Champions League, where it belongs.”Of course, the landscape of women’s soccer has undergone a seismic shift, both domestically and in Europe, in the decade or so since Everton last graced that competition. At the start of the 2010s, Everton’s rivals for a place were Arsenal, Birmingham City, Liverpool. They were teams mostly populated by British players; few, if any, trained in the same facilities as their respective men’s teams.Chelsea used deep pockets and expensive signings to climb to the top of the Super League last season.John Walton/Press Association, via Associated PressThe W.S.L. of 2021 is starkly different: dominated by the polyglot squads constructed, at lavish expense, by Chelsea, City and Arsenal. The former boasts not only the most expensive women’s player of all time, the striker Pernille Harder, but the highest-paid female player in the world, Sam Kerr.Manchester City can call on the backbone of the England national squad — the captain Steph Houghton, Lucy Bronze, Ellen White, half a dozen others — and has sufficient financial clout that it was able to tempt one of Everton’s best players, the Australian wing Hayley Raso, to Manchester this summer. Arsenal, meanwhile, can lay claim to possessing possibly the world’s best player: the Dutch striker Vivianne Miedema. On Friday, it picked up one of the American star Tobin Heath.Those three teams have stood, almost unchallenged, at the summit of the W.S.L. for some time. They have combined to win the last five titles — Chelsea claiming three — and have accounted for every English spot in the Champions League since 2014. They are, as Kirk admitted, a formidable barrier.And yet the club believes it can break that stranglehold. “I’ve made it clear to the players that to do it we will have to punch above our weight in terms of budget,” he said. “Finance does come into it, but we feel we are there.”He credits the club’s “clever” recruitment, led by its sporting director, Sarvar Ismailov — a nephew of Alisher Usmanov, the business partner of Everton’s majority owner Farhad Moshiri, who has now been appointed to the club’s board — for much of that growth. “We have to be flexible, and we have to be smarter,” Kirk said.Within the club, Ismailov is credited with both having a keen eye for talent and an ability to drive a bargain: There are, Kirk has said previously and approvingly, “not many in the women’s game who like him.” It was Ismailov who led the campaign to land perhaps the most eye-catching of Everton’s summer recruits, the 18-year-old Swedish midfielder Hanna Bennison, the club’s record signing.Anna Anvegard, left, and Hanna Bennison, center, are teammates in Sweden. Everton added them both, as well as Nathalie Björn, with the three players earning the nickname Swedish House Mafia.Jamie Sabau/Getty ImagesBut that is only one element. When she looks back at the club she joined almost two years ago, now, Christiansen sees “something special,” something that Kirk traces not just to the raft of new players.“We have improved our working practices,” he said, a category that doubtless includes the hiring of a uniform attendant. “We have signed a lot of previous winners. We have always had a positive environment, but that breeds a winning culture.”It is a trend he sees across the club. Everton is working on building a new stadium (principally) for its men’s team. The last two coaches of the men’s team, Carlo Ancelotti and Rafa Benítez, are both Champions League winners. The ambition for the women’s team, in Kirk’s eyes, is no different to the ambition for the men’s.Perhaps, though, that relationship does not function quite as it is often presented. Everton has been condemned — through sheer economics as much as anything else — to life in the upper mid-table of the Premier League. It would cost the club hundreds of millions of dollars in transfer fees to even have a hope of overhauling Manchester City’s and Chelsea’s men’s teams.In the women’s game, though, it can now consider itself a force. It can talk of winning a place in the Champions League, and it can think, not entirely idly, of winning a championship. It can contemplate meeting clubs that exist on a different stratum in men’s soccer as something approaching equals in women’s.That has not come cheap — Bennison alone cost a “substantial six-figure sum” to coax from Rosengard — and it has not been straightforward. But Everton, unlike many of its peers in the no-man’s-land below the elite in the Premier League, now has the reward: a chance to compete, to challenge, and perhaps to surpass. That impetus has not flowed from the men’s team to the women’s but, if anything, the other way round.That is what all of those changes, the small and the large alike, have added up to: a club that has a stage on which to be truly ambitious once more, and a team that is not afraid to talk about it. More

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      Everton Beats Liverpool at Anfield, Adding to the Champions' Pain

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerA Collision at Anfield Does Little to Slow Liverpool’s FallEverton’s victory, a cause for deserved celebration, reveals a broken Liverpool team holding tight to a system that has stopped working.Mohamed Salah cut down by Tom Davies, a fair reflection of Liverpool’s afternoon, its month, its season.Credit…Pool photo by Phil NobleFeb. 20, 2021, 4:50 p.m. ETLIVERPOOL, England — It is every week, now, that Liverpool seems to lose another little piece of itself. An unbeaten home record that stretched back more than three years disappeared in January, spirited away by Burnley. The sense of Anfield as a fortress collapsed soon after, stormed in short order by Brighton and then by Manchester City.The golden afterglow of the long-awaited Premier League crown that arrived last summer has been dimming for some time, but it darkened for good last week, with Jürgen Klopp conceding the Premier League title while still in the bitter grip of winter.And then, as fireworks boomed and car horns blared across Merseyside on Saturday evening, came what may be the most hurtful shift of all. Everton had not tasted victory at Anfield this century. It had not won a derby at all in more than a decade. For Liverpool, the impotence of its neighbor and rival had been a source of such unbridled glee that it had long since been fused into part of its self-identity.But now, all of that, too, has gone. Richarlison put Everton ahead after just three minutes. Carlo Ancelotti’s team held Liverpool at arm’s length with a degree of comfort, ruffled only in flurries, for the rest of the evening.The only hint that the Everton players knew they were close to making — or, perhaps, ending — history came in their celebrations when Gylfi Sigurdsson settled the game from the penalty spot with 10 minutes to play, completing the 2-0 score line. The reactions were raucous and definitive, the sound of a curse being lifted. On the touchline, Duncan Ferguson, part of the fabric of Everton for almost all of that 20-year spell, first as a player and now as a coach, bounced and roared.Liverpool’s defeat was its fourth straight at home.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsEverton’s victory was its first at Anfield since 1999.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsOf course, Ancelotti and his players deserve praise and admiration for the precision and the poise of their performance, but the approach that brought them victory relies on a confluence of factors. First, of course, is that your team must be focused and disciplined and organized: not far from perfect, in fact.Second, you must be, if not lucky, then at least not unlucky: even the most finely laid plan can be undone by an unfortunate bounce of the ball, an arbitrary deflection, a moment of wonder.And third, you need your opponent to be found wanting. A team full of confidence and energy and ideas will, most often, pick a way through even the most masterful defense. Liverpool lacked all of those things utterly and absolutely.It is not desperately hard to work out why Liverpool has toiled so much this season. Klopp, certainly, does not believe there is any great mystery here. Liverpool has lost not only Virgil Van Dijk, but Joe Gomez and Joel Matip to injury, tearing the base out of its defense, of its team. Klopp has had little choice but to dismantle his midfield to patch up his defense.But that is just the start. At times, it has seemed as if everything that could have gone wrong for Liverpool this season has gone wrong. It is easier to list the players who have not spent at least a few weeks in the treatment room: Andy Robertson, Georginio Wijnaldum, Roberto Firmino, Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mané.Fabinho, the first midfielder drafted into defense, is currently absent with his own injury. Jordan Henderson, the second, limped off in the first half Saturday with a groin injury. Alisson Becker, widely regarded as the one of the world’s best goalkeepers and the one reassuring presence in Liverpool’s make-do-and-mend back-line, made three glaring errors in the defeats to Manchester City and Leicester.Jordan Henderson became the latest indispensable Liverpool player lost to injury.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsIf the root of the problem does not require forensic investigation, though, the response to it might. Klopp has, at times, appeared noticeably more irascible than usual this season, clashing with television reporters, snapping at journalists in news conferences, exchanging cross words with opposing managers.When it emerged earlier this month that he had endured a personal tragedy — the death of his mother — it seemed as if that offered an explanation for the change in mood. Klopp, though, is adamant that he is able to compartmentalize his emotions; those who work with him say there has been no real change. Klopp has always been prickly. What has changed is the perception. Terseness from a position of strength is a flexing of the muscles. From a position of weakness, it looks a lot like a tantrum.Indeed, it is striking that, even as what started as a dip has become a slump and now, on the back four consecutive home defeats — the club’s worst run since 1923 — has the look of a spiral, Liverpool has not sought change of any sort.That is true of the club as a whole — its failure to have a central defensive reinforcement ready to go on January 1 was the act of a club operating in the old world, not the new — and it is especially true of Klopp. The style has stayed the same. The system has stayed the same. “The only way I know is to try it again, and again, and again,” he said Friday.It was a telling statement. Klopp is the archetype of what might be called a system coach: He has a way of playing that is baked into his soul. His counterpart at Everton, Ancelotti, is the opposite: a manager who once coached Andrea Pirlo but who is perfectly content, in a different time, to instruct Michael Keane and Ben Godfrey to punt the ball long and hopeful, over and over again, hoping to catch the right current in the wind.Everton’s victory pulled it even with Liverpool on points in the Premier League table. But the teams are headed in different directions.Credit…Pool photo by Laurence GriffithsSuch pragmatism is anathema to Klopp. Changing his style, so integral to his identity, would mean changing himself. That is the trait that has brought him such success, of course; it is possible, though, that it might also be what limits it in certain circumstances, that his loyalty to the system is damaging when external factors mean the system itself can no longer work.Klopp has experienced a run like this — a period when it feels as though nothing goes right — once before, in his last year at Borussia Dortmund. Then, too, his squad was ravaged by injuries. He had, in the previous seasons, dealt with the departure of a raft of key players, too. He refused to compromise his beliefs. Dortmund finished seventh, and he stepped down.The echoes of that year grow stronger with every passing week at Liverpool, with every new and unwanted record that falls. Liverpool keeps doing the same things, expecting different results, a team banging its head against a brick wall. It keeps losing all those little pieces of itself, lost in the shadow of an identity that cannot countenance change.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More