Bit later than usual today, on account of midweek ‘on a school night‘ drinking last night. The Management and I have promised ourselves there’ll be no booze this evening. Let’s see how that plays out…

And let’s see how the press conferences play out today. I hope Arteta hits the assembled journo’s with a big fat “see what happens when teams don’t come to play anti-football against us??” vibe. That’s what I’d do. But I’m an emotional, irrational football fan. And that’s why they don’t pay me the big bucks.

So we’ll just get a little bit more vanilla from the boss, who will give us a team news update and the one we all want to know about is Bukayo Saka. All we heard in the aftermath of the Bayern game was Arteta saying, “It does not look good”. I feel like he’s been wrong with some of his instant responses before, but equally he’s also been spot on, so it will be interesting to see what he has to say now that there’s been a bit more time that has elapsed. Sometimes the worst injuries are the ones that happen when there isn’t a collision, and the way he went down and then held his quad has plenty of online physios talking about how it could be a couple of months basedon where he was holding his hands for where the injury was, as well as the nature of how he kicked the ground and then instantly went down. It’ll be a real shame for Saka, because it feels like he’s been plagued with various different injuries in different parts of his body for a few seasons now. If we’re lucky it might only be a few weeks. If we’re unlucky we might not see him until 2027.

Hopefully the rest of the team are fine. From an Everton perspective, we’ll also get confirmation from David Moyes, who may even wheel out Norgaard against his old club, or even Ainsley Maitland-Niles. Both will get a warm reception I suspect, but that won’t last, as we’ll need game faces on to pick up all three points. There’ll have Barry and Grealish for us to worry about, but having looked at the stats, I think we all know that this will be another low-block team who will press us in patches, but try to maintain their shape and frustrate. The data tells us that Everton are a side in the five for high turnovers, which I think is interesting, and they are in the top five for pressed sequences too. They have the seventh-best defensive record in the league on xG, plus the best ball recovery numbers of anyone in the league. They win almost as many ground duels as us and arein the top five for fast breaks. So I think we’re going to come up against another well-drilled side and the inevitable Jordan Pickford time-wasting on goal kicks that will never go unpunished – even with their new countdown rule the refs do (which I actually think is a good addition to be fair).

Their fans are not exactly optimistic, with the following comments I found on one of their forums:

Second verse, same as the first. We’ll gift them three points because of our manager.

And:

Let us grieve, man!

And:

Let me guess, brave resistance and a solid rearguard effort, but lose 2-0.

I can see why they are a little melancholy after the home defeat to Chelsea last weekend, but they sit eighth in the Premier League, they have two ins, four draws and just that one defeat, so they are hardly in a poor vein of form. It’s not rich, but it isn’t shocking.

But do the pundits feel the same? The Sports Mole team reckon it’ll be just that, a 2-0 win, whilst Chris Sutton on the BBC thinks the same scoreline too, and given that was the eventual one last season, you can understand why. Even Lewis Jones on Sky Sports is going with that too, and it kind of feels like there’s a reason they’re all saying this. If that is to be the case (and I really hope it is), then I just want us to score in the first half. We just haven’t done enough of that lately and I don’t know about you, but it’s starting to wind me up!

Right, I’ll leave it there for today. I should probably go and do some actual work. Catch you all tomorrow for the usual match preview. Be good.