The Skipper

Can't believe people actually wanted to start him over Costa.

Getting thrown under the bus by our own fans even though he was the best CB in England last year after a bit of a bad start of the season. Great.

Yes because Gary Cahill does so well against intelligent strikers with pace... He gets terrorised more than JT does.

We really needed a Schurrle type on the other side of the wing to Hazard and I think we've got a great option in Pedro.

Yeah I suppose. Watching it again JT did tug him quite a bit but how often do defenders actually do that?

Our CMs need to wake up, Matic and Fabregas were awful today. Absolutely awful. They're looking like Championship players at the moment. These guys were the best CM pairing in the league last season.

Him getting spun completely for their second goal?All of their chances came from the left as well.

I'm one of his biggest supporters but yeah. He has been useless. For all of our games in this season.

He barely pulled him. He did not pull him enough for him to go down like that.

How are people even saying that it's a foul? Ridiculous. He barely touched him. It's slippery conditions.

It was not a foul.

Ridiculous decision.

Matic's man, he should be watching the edge off our box. Poor from Ivan again though.

Shhhhhh.

Pedro!!!!

What a difference a year makes for Fabregas and Matic... Both look like shadows of their former selves.

He's just an awkward turtle.

Why stop at that then? Why are we stopping at where players are losing the ball? I don't really do stats personally but if we look at chances created per player, I'm very certain that Costa trumps Lukaku in that by quite some distance. Maybe Costa loses the ball more because he tries to be a lot more adventurous than Lukaku? Have you ever thought of that?

Fair play. Rondon is a player of similar profile (pace, bit of a maverick of a striker) so we can substitute both - point still stands.

Those same stats have the likes of Alexis Sanchez and Sterling (IIRC) losing the ball just as much as Costa does, doesn't mean Lukaku is better than either technically does it.

But JT has never ever been the quickest and Cahill isn't exactly quick enough to deal with Aguero either. To be honest, Aguero isn't even the quickest player, he has really good acceleration but not amazing lateral speed. It's all about his intelligence going forward. Even when he loses speed, Aguero will still be a menace because he's a very intelligent forward. That is what was causing problems really, not his pace IMO. Between JT and Cahill, JT has a better skill set to deal with that because he's simply the better natural defender. Jose took off the wrong man. Aguero was picking at Cahill for the majority of the game, and not JT. Cahill struggled a lot more than John did. Glad that JT starts today though. Maybe Jose realised his mistake after he watched the game back a few times. We don't want a repeat of Aguero (with Berahino/Rondon/McManaman) so he definitely made the right choice.

It wasn't just the trend in this forum though, it was general consensus even amongst Everton fans. From back in the thread: It really isn't just on here that people have this opinion that Lukaku is technically limited and that he struggles to control a ball and link up well. One game doesn't change that.

So after the massive kerfuffle surrounding JT it's Cahill that gets dropped...