Frank Lampard said, “Amadou something cool.” Onanather day, it might have won Everton the derby.
This Saturday’s Merseyside derby was one of the more enjoyable ones in recent memory; not least for the fact that there actually were two teams in the contest, instead of it simply being another item on Liverpool & Jurgen Klopp’s to-do list. There were some engaging storylines to emerge from the game, not least Nathan Patterson’s coming-of-age as a Premier League player, Alex Iwobi’s second wind as a deeper-lying midfielder and Neal Maupay’s extremely solid Everton debut. A nice piece from Jonathan Liew talking about manager Frank Lampard’s influence also came out yesterday.
Frankie L has been much maligned as a manager since his days as Chelsea boss, and I’m admittedly not one of his biggest fans. That being said, there was a facet of Everton’s tactical plan from Goodison that I was very impressed with, and if that was Lampard’s idea, then hats off to him.
So let’s talk about Amadou Onana. And about goal kicks.
Onana has hit the ground running in English football. Everton signed him for £33 million, after just one season at Ligue 1 outfit Lille OSC. At the time (perhaps even still), there were two possibilities; it would either be a solid move, or he’d join the near-endless list of expensive missteps made by Everton in transfer windows of the recent past. Current evidence says that it’s likely to be the former. Since his debut as an 81st-minute substitute against Aston Villa on matchday 2, Onana has been a fixture in the Everton midfield, often at its base. While results haven’t been great for the Toffees (2 losses followed by 4 consecutive draws so far), he has been a large part of the reason why performances have been improving.
On Saturday, he was at it again. In an all-action midfield performance, he held Everton together and helped the side to an extemely credible result against their mighty (albeit currently slightly tame) Merseyside rivals. Greg O’Keefe wrote more on the same for The Athletic here. What I want to focus on is one specific duty he was assigned on the day.
Now, on to goal kicks. Broadly, you see teams either pump it upfield or play it short to the centre-backs/full-backs to build out from the back. The latter often has meticulously thought-out patterns of play and a clear objective, but the former not so much. It’s usually employed to either clear the danger or, at best to get it forward quickly to a big, bustling, centre-forward. These two approaches are often mutually exclusive, but Everton managed to blend the two — going long with a clear plan — to near-perfection on Saturday.
Playing out from the back would have been next to impossible, as they simply did not have the personnel for it. Jordan Pickford in goal is comfortably above average. Nathan Patterson and Vitaliy Mykolenko are good enough on the ball, but Conor Coady, while being a solid covering defender is uninspiring in possession. James Tarkowski is _good_, but that’s about all. This motley crew trying to tiki-taka their way out the back would be risky against any opposition, so against Liverpool and their famously suffocating press they’d have been better off politely asking Salah & co to go easy.
Think about going long though, and I’m sure Lampard would’ve stared the pants off of anyone who suggested it. If they stood on top of each other, his front three of Anthony Gordon, Neal Maupay and Demarai Gray would *maybe* get a whiff of Virgil van Dijk’s immaculately-coiffed-and-perfumed man bun. There was the option of using Salomón Rondón, but his complete lack of match fitness, and the drop-off from Maupay in other aspects of his play didn’t make him worth starting.
So at this point, Everton looked damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. They knew they’d get plenty of goal kicks because Liverpool were going to take loads of shots, but they simply didn’t seem to have a reliable way of using these situations to their advantage. It also felt like a waste of the best distributor in their defense.
This was where Onana came in.
At 195 cm tall, the Belgian was comfortably the largest Everton player on the pitch. There was just one problem though; he was playing at DM. Moving him away from there would be risky, but that’s what Everton did. On goal kicks, Onana took up a position on the left wing as Everton shifted into what was closer to a 4–2–4 shape, with Iwobi and Davies moving just a bit deeper, in front of the back four.
Presumably, the idea behind shifting him to the left instead of simply pushing him forward through the centre was to match Onana up with Trent Alexander-Arnold, who stands pretty much no chance of troubling him. Liverpool attempted to counter this by sticking Joe Gomez on Onana. This could have been a simple swap with TAA moving inside to cover Gomez’s position, but perhaps that wasn’t a risk Jurgen Klopp felt was worth taking, given the right-back’s relative unease with defending.
As a result, Fabinho moved back from his defensive midfield position to cover that space, meaning Liverpool essentially formed a line of five at the back, with Carvalho & Elliott in midfield and the front three staying high. The following screenshot is a great example of what I’m talking about.
It has to be said at this point that Klopp’s midfield selection did play into Everton’s hands a little bit. Harvey Elliott and Fábio Carvalho are fabulously talented footballers, but their youth and naturally offensive tendencies meant that they weren’t quite able to instinctively recognise areas that needed shutting down. Observe the difference in spacing between Iwobi & Davies, and Elliott & Carvalho.
Another element in Everton’s favour here is that their setup made them better equipped to win second balls. With Mykolenko pushing up slightly from left-back, and small distances between Gordon & Maupay and Iwobi & Davies, they’d be at a numerical advantage if the ball went into the space between Liverpool’s back five and midfield two, which was where Onana would be looking to knock it down, if not flick it on behind him. Elliott & Carvalho being so far apart also meant that if the ball came to Iwobi, Everton’s best player on the ball, he had ample space ahead of him to attack.
All this also made Onana’s job easier because effectively, he didn’t even need to win the first header. As long as he ensured that Gomez couldn’t make clean contact with a clearing header, Everton would likely be on the front foot. If the Belgian did win it though, they would definitely be. Here’s a little clip from Pickford’s goal kick in the 19th minute:
The structure was slightly shifted in this instance, with Anthony Gordon hugging the line, wide of Onana. But the basic idea of Onana winning the header and the ball eventually being sent back to Iwobi to make something happen was still intact. Additionally, Everton emphasised moving the ball quickly in these situations to ensure that Liverpool would still be reorganising their defensive structure while they were moving forwards.
Liverpool failed to adapt to this strategy throughout the first half. Interestingly, after they were forced into replacing Carvalho with Roberto Firmino at half-time, Everton did try to change things up a bit due to Firmino naturally staying closer to Elliott. They retained the 4–3–3 shape and tried to hit Gordon from the goal kick once, as well as attempted one short goal kick, which…erm...went about as well as you’d expect.
These experiments were swiftly abandoned, and Lampard replaced Tom Davies with the more defensively-minded Idrissa Gueye on 62 minutes, ensuring an extra layer of defensive security when Onana was pushed up. The only other change Everton made was to bring Dwight McNeil on in place of Anthony Gordon, which saw Demarai Gray move to the left wing and make darting runs in behind Onana and the Liverpool backline.
All in all, this little tactical detail is what I think helped Everton keep some sort of pressure on Liverpool, not allowing them to run away with the game. As mentioned in the title, I think on another day this could have been extremely effective. What worked against Everton was the fact that they just didn’t get that many opportunities to implement it, partly on them because of what a specific plan it was. But it was ingenious, and while Everton may still have been in danger on occasion against a below-average Liverpool, their fans can rest assured there’s a good deal of thought going into their game plans behind the scenes.
Bonus: Here’s a compilation of all of Everton’s goal kicks from the game. Observe Onana’s positioning on each one.
