The season is fast approaching its conclusion, and with five games to go, Everton still have European ambitions to fight for.
Carlo Ancelotti stated following the Blues’ standout opening day victory at Tottenham Hotspur that qualifying for Europe was the aim, and his side are only four points off the top six with a game in hand.
Yet few are optimistic about their chances on the back of another disappointing home defeat last weekend, this time against Aston Villa.
Throughout the season, spells of good form and progression have been marred by poor results all too often - particularly at home. Notably, the Toffees haven’t strung together more than three back-to-back victories since the end of last year.
It’s why for the bulk of the campaign so far, Everton have remained within touching distance of the European places but rarely been able to seize their opportunity to break into them.
The erratic nature of the campaign which can largely be attributed to inconsistent performances from players within key areas of the pitch will have acted as a reminder to Ancelotti that reinforcements are needed in the summer.
A need for a new right-back, right-sided attacker, central defender and even goalkeeper have all been discussed, but in terms of the latter, Jordan Pickford’s form may have eased Ancelotti’s long-term concerns about that particular position.
After a promising start to life at Goodison Park following his switch from Sunderland in 2017, Pickford has for a long time been a source of debate amongst Everton fans.
Things such as his agility and impressive ball distribution skills have made him a popular player for many, including England manager Gareth Southgate who made the Everton man his number one.
However, there’s another more erratic side to his game that has appeared all too often, leading to silly errors and poor shot-stopping displays.
This point is captured by the fact that last season, only Newcastle’s Martin Dúbravka had more errors leading to goals than Pickford’s total of four.
Additionally, based on post-shot expected goals (PSxG), a metric widely used to analyse how many goals a keeper would have been expected to concede based on the quality of chances faced, Pickford’s PSxG-against of 48.7 was much lower than his league goals conceded total of 56.
What this means in basic terms is that he conceded roughly seven goals more than what would have been expected, and that underperformance ranked as the second-worst across the league behind only Chelsea’s Kepa Arrizabalaga.
It wouldn’t be unfair to say he started this campaign in a similar fashion and by the close of the calendar year, he was already underperforming against his PSxG by 2.1 goals.
However, since the start of 2021, the 27-year-old has seemingly banished his inconsistent form and error-prone habits to emerge as one of Everton’s best and most consistent performers.
We saw this in his display in Saturday evening’s 2-1 defeat to Villa where he was arguably the Blues’ man of the match despite conceding two goals, and the below illustrates the subtle improvements in his underlying numbers since the turn of the year.
Pickford’s 26 league appearances split helpfully to 13 on either side of New Year. In the final 13 games of 2020, he conceded an average of 1.31 goals from a PSxG average of 1.15. This broke down to an underperformance of -0.16 per 90.
However, since the turn of the year, the average number of goals conceded by Pickford has dropped to 1.23, despite his PSxG increasing. There’s also been a slight increase in the number of shots he’s faced in this period too.
What this tells us is that Pickford is facing more shots of a higher quality on average in 2021, compared to what he was in 2020, yet he’s doing a better job of saving them.
These numbers coincide with what we’ve witnessed from the keeper for much of the year so far, this is that he’s a reliable shot-stopper who is bringing value to the team not just in terms of things like his distribution, but also in terms of keeping the opposition out with good saves.
That latter point is above all else the primary objective of any goalkeeper. Ancelotti will be hoping he can maintain this form for the rest of this season and beyond because doing so will alleviate at least one of his transfer headaches going forward.
