Everton end campaign with hammering at the Etihad – by Matt Townsend

So that was the 2020-21 Premier League season, which finished for Everton with a 5-0 drubbing at the hands of new champions Manchester City yesterday.

At the end of another final day full of the usual twists and turns the Toffees finished tenth and were overtaken by Arsenal and Leeds two teams who had looked likely to struggle for survival six months ago.

It wasn’t a surprise that the Blues were beaten by the team that has been head and shoulders above the rest for most of the season and that has handed out some serious drubbings over the course of this campaign.

But even so the manner of the defeat at City was a telling one and seemed to perfectly sum up the problems with this Toffees team.

Everton again lacked focus, energy and commitment and withered far too easily once Manchester City had opened the scoring through Kevin de Bruyne shortly after the start of the match.

The lack of quality and inability to do even the basics of passing consistently and defending soundly were on display again in a perfect microcosm of all the shortcomings that we have seen too often this season.

And had it not been for another standout display from Jordan Pickford (surely the Blues most improved player during the second half of the season – that’s something I never thought I’d say!), then the score could have been eight or nine.

Everton had a penalty, which could also have resulted in a red card for the offending player and perhaps if it was any other club it would have done, but anyway it didn’t matter as Gylfi Sigurdsson missed the spot kick.

In the second half the Toffees collapsed and City added three further goals with Sergio Aguero coming on for his final match and netting twice as the home team scored five in total to run out easy winners.

The gulf in footballing ability between the Blues and City is obvious and underlines just how far Everton have to go to compete with the best teams in the Premier League, but it’s the lack of those other more intangible qualities that is perhaps most worrying.

Too many of these very well paid footballers don’t appear to have the desire to play for this team as they’ve shown with all those horrible performances and losses at home this term to sides they should be beating, like Leeds, West Ham, Newcastle United, Fulham, Burnley and Sheffield United.

Looking at that list it underlines how many points the Toffees have squandered during the campaign, which have cost Everton the chance of playing European football next season.

The lack of fans in the ground has obviously played a significant part with the Blues unbeaten at Goodison whenever supporters were there.

But every other team had to cope without fans and most did better than Everton and in fact the Blues home form was as bad as the relegated teams so something else is missing.

At the end of another season of disappointment and under-achievement the top brass at Everton have a lot of thinking to do about how they are going to improve this team and who in terms of new players they need to try and bring in when the summer transfer window opens.