Wigan

Awful. Awful. Awful. Again. I have an opinion on Everton's season to date. I think we've played well for a solitary 45 minutes in the second half against Man Utd at home. That's it. We battled well at Stoke and played reasonably in patches at West Ham and Hull. Pretty much everything else has been rank. And the Wigan game yesterday was a perfect illustration. No tactical approach, no guile, no style. If you don't have any decent footballers in the starting eleven (and i'm excluding Arteta here now because anyone who delivers set pieces as badly as he is doing isn't a good player), you have to fight for it. That's what we did when Joe Royle turned up in the 90s. Fought well until he could add craft. But we seem to have elected not to bother and the best footballers also happen to be the smallest and most easily dealt with by the stronger players in the Premier League (Osman, Pienaar).

On paper and looking at the League table, Wigan were bad. They didn't even play well but beat Everton quite comfortably. If Tim Howard hadn't been in top save-making mode it could have been a three goal defeat.

I see us live most weeks and have felt we've been riding our luck and getting unmerited results for weeks; Fulham at home, Bolton and West Ham away. Didn't outplay any of those three mediocre teams. Middlesboro looked at ease for most of the home game last weekend. Don't fancy a festive run up to Xmas.

Rank.