Everton vs Brighton & Hove Albion
Everton begin the final season at Goodison Park after 132 years when they take on Brighton & Hove Albion in their opening game of 2024-25 this Saturday.
It promises to be an emotional nine months as the various “last ever…” occasions at the Grand Old Lady slide by but the Club also enter the new season with a welcome sense of relative stability and, perhaps, a degree of optimism that under Sean Dyche the team can demonstrate some more progress after three difficult years.
In the likes of new signings Iliman Ndiaye and Jesper Lindstrøm, the Blues might not only have acquired players to improve the team but also inject some excitement and “bums off seats” potential, the like of which has been in short supply since the days of Carlo Ancelotti and James Rodriguez… days when, cruelly, fans were absent from Premier League stadiums because of the pandemic.
Just as they did last year, though, Everton will kick off the new season without Club Captain Seamus Coleman after he was ruled out of Saturday’s clash with the Seagulls.
Coleman was withdrawn during the first half of last weekend’s pre-season friendly with Roma at Goodison Park after tweaking a calf muscle, leaving manager Sean Dyche with only two fit senior full-backs.
Ashley Young deputised for the Irishman at right-back against the Italian side and, with Nathan Patterson having only just resumed light training following his surgery earlier in the year, the veteran will take up that position against Brighton, with Vitalii Mykolenko back fit and able to play on the other side of defence.
In the centre, Jarrad Branthwaite continues his recovery from hernia surgery and will also be missing, with new signing Jake O’Brien and fit-again Michael Keane vying to start in his place alongside James Tarkowski.
In midfield, James Garner is also unavailable with the soft-tissue complaint he picked up in training last month and that could see Tim Iroegbunam handed an immediate debut on the basis of his impressive displays during pre-season.
Depending on whom Dyche selects to partner Tarkowski, the £9m acquisition from Aston Villa could be the only new man in the starting XI. Famously cautious and pragmatic, Dyche is expected to go with the dependable Abdoulaye Doucouré playing off Dominic Calvert-Lewin and last season’s wing outlets of Jack Harrison and Dwight McNeil.
In that case, Messers Ndiaye and Lindstrøm would, therefore, need to play their way into starting contention via their performances off the bench in the early games, and the hope among supporters is that they very quickly make it impossible for Dyche to ignore them.
Brighton, meanwhile, come to L4 in a period of further transition. Roberto de Zerbi left the club at the end of last season after 18 months in charge since coming in to replace Chelsea-bound Graham Potter and has been succeeded by the youngest permanently-appointed head coach in Premier League history in Fabian Hürzeler.
The 31-year-old only received his Uefa Pro License last year but has an impressive record in his short career to date, lifting St Pauli from the grips of a relegation battle to the fringes of promotion to the Bundesliga before completing the job last season, taking the Hamburg club into Germany’s top flight.
In terms of their summer business, the Seagulls may have lost long-serving midfielder Pascal Groß but they have drafted in Everton target Yankuba Minteh to add pace and trickery to that already provided in their ranks by the likes of Kaoru Mitoma.
