Kurt Zouma’s header tied the score for West Ham, and Tomas Soucek’s goal in stoppage time made the Blues pay. Edson Alvarez then sealed the three points.
Everton’s low number of goals from open play this season—15 of their 29 goals come from set pieces—has raised concerns. Dyche believes there is a lack of confidence from the outside that the Blues cannot score a goal in another manner and has tasked them with proving their skeptics wrong.
After a 1-1 draw against Brighton, Goodison manager Dyche responded to a question about whether his team’s recent late concedes in two games should worry him by saying, “I don’t think we have [struggled] seeing it out, it’s not taking chances.” The frustrating thing is that we’re still having opportunities at 1-0. You have to end games by either defending well or scoring a second goal because everyone in the Premier League had the right to score a goal.
“Scoring that second goal has been a nemesis all season, scoring the first has been a challenge. When you do that, you’ve seen in the recent run of four wins, score the first, second, third and fourth in some cases. That’s the requirement, it’s not just containing a game. I thought we were containing the ball and creating chances, that is the frustration. It’s obviously very frustrating. Take the goals out and anyone would say that’s a decent performance.
“I can’t keep saying that when you’re not winning games and it’s got to be created, we have got to win games, we’ve got to keep having the freedom to score. The only thing I would say, psychologically, and I’ll be telling the players this; at the moment, no-one thinks you can score from free play. You’ve never had a better chance to score from free play because if no-one thinks [you are] anyway, what difference does it make? Let’s go and play, score and have the freedom to miss. If everyone thinks that you can’t then go and do it.”
