Maybe in a different universe, Nuno Espirito Santo might be taking his new Everton side to former club Wolverhampton Wanderers tonight but instead of course he finds himself out of work after a four-month stint at Tottenham Hotspur came to an abrupt halt.
A lucky escape for the Blues or just another example of Daniel Levy’s twitchy trigger finger?
Everton themselves have made their way through six managers in five years since Farhad Moshiri took control of the club but even they have never pushed the panic button so quickly.
This correspondent can vividly recall a conversation back on June 12 with another dad at a junior game who is a Goodison Park season ticket holder.
At the time, a number of national titles had gone in hard that Nuno was edging towards getting the Blues vacancy and to say that this fellow parent was underwhelmed by the prospect would be an understatement to say the least.
A single supporter alone cannot be expected to represent an entire match-going fanbase of almost 40,000 but the reservations over the Portuguese coach’s style and methods did not bode well.
Everton are understood to have first sounded out the former goalkeeper for their top job after Ronald Koeman’s sacking back in 2017 but at the time he was riding high at Wolverhampton Wanderers in the Championship en route to guiding them to a top flight return following a six-year absence.
After an impressive Premier League debut campaign in which they finished above Marco Silva’s Blues as best of the rest after the established ‘big six’ in 2018/19, Wolves appeared a coming force in the division.
However, a couple of more years down the line and with the impact of some serious financial belt-tightening kicking in, it was a rather different landscape.
The 47-year-old departed the Black Country outfit “by mutual consent” which made many Evertonians take a more cynical stance that his availability for the Goodison vacancy was all very convenient.
Here was an out-of-work manager with recent Premier League experience, but what would he actually bring to the party?
Nuno’s subsequent record after ultimately been appointed by Spurs instead was far from awful – he departed a point above Everton in the table having played one Premier League game more – but the displays over these 10 matches left many in north London cold.
Harry Kane has netted just once in the Premier League so far this season while the three centre-back system that he favours has never been an effective long term tactic at the Blues.
After Mr Moshiri made the controversial choice of hiring former Rafa Benitez instead, the former Liverpool manager was generally able to keep a lid on fan reservations throughout the early weeks of the campaign thanks to a series of encouraging performances and bright displays from his prudent summer signings Andros Townsend and Demarai Gray.
A sense of context must also be grasped when assessing the situation and while such results were generally achieved in matches you’d be expecting Everton to take points from, a certain degree of mitigation must also be given for the injuries suffered to key players.
Such fitness issues have continued to bite in recent matches and all of a sudden after back-to-back home defeats, tonight’s trip to Molineux takes on extra importance.
Perhaps sensing that he’s approaching an early crossroads, Benitez came out and asked for patience ahead of this game, speaking about changing things at the club “little by little” and declaring that: “Rome was not built in a day.”
Unlike Nuno at Spurs, the Spaniard has been given a relatively easy ride so far with a fanbase tired of managerial changes and willing to reserve judgement on both his past affiliations and current attributes and for that he’ll be thankful.
It’s been said by a few people already that Benitez might not have been the manager that Evertonians wanted – although neither was Nuno it seems – but he could be the boss they needed.
Of course like all in his profession, this theory will be ultimately judged on results and the Blues could certainly do with a timely pick-me-up at Wolves ahead of some tough-looking fixtures on the horizon, starting with the visit of a certain Tottenham Hotspur at Goodison next time out.
