“Quality in the final third” is almost becoming a comical phrase at Goodison Park. Not since Yakubu was in form three years ago have we had a regular goalscorer or for that matter a regular striker what with Louis Saha’s injury record indicating his bones are made out of broken biscuits. And so again it proved against our geographical rivals from the other end of the East Lancs with clinical finishing the only real difference between the two teams.

Our record against Man Utd in the Premier League is, to put it bluntly, fucking awful. Only a small handful of wins pepper a long list of defeats and the occasional draw. Indeed one of the only away games I managed to get to was a 3-0 defeat at Old Trafford. They battered us and the game was memorable for two things. Some teenage pleb was singing songs about the Munich disaster before an older guy told him, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Sit down and shut up you stupid, ugly piece of shit.” I’ve never seen a person visibly shrink before my eyes. The other thing was at the end of the game, as the Everton fans trudged towards the exits, the away section speakers started booming out the Python classic, ‘Always look on the bright side of life.’ Funny and tragic at the same time.

Fast forward 10 years and things are much the same. Man Utd are still dominating the English game and Everton are still struggling to win anything with an annual transfer budget equating to the price of a Curly Wurly.

We actually didn’t start too badly with a couple of half-chances in the first few minutes. But as it’s become depressingly customary in October the opposition quickly gained a stranglehold on possession and territory and on the 20 minute mark took the lead. Evra found some space down the left side before crossing it in where Hernandez managed to lose his marker and score from 2 yards out.

I thought that might have been the start of domination by Man Utd but to be fair the rest of the half panned out pretty fairly. We were seriously unlucky when Baines had a free kick that smacked off the underside of the bar with De Gea stranded but apart from that we didn’t come close to testing the Man Utd goal even though we saw a fair bit of the ball.

Bilyaletdinov was hauled off a half-time for Barkley for reasons unclear (Injured? Just shite?). Barkley is very highly rated and rightly so but for some reason he couldn’t get into this game and every time I noticed him on the ball he was either going backwards or giving the ball away. But he is young and asking him to try and turn a game around against the champions is a bit of an ask for a 17 year old.

We did see plenty of the ball in the second half but as mentioned at the start, we just lacked that quality in the final third. More specifically, Saha was shooting like a person who hasn’t kicked a ball before. Every shot was straight at De Gea and weaker than Dutch lager when we did manage to get near their goal and the game played out in an all-too-familiar pattern.

I’m glad to see the back of that month. Defeats against Liverpool, Chelsea (twice) and Man Utd with only a win against Fulham keeping us out of the bottom three. I was slightly more encouraged with the way we passed the ball against Man United though and hopefully we carry this on for our next game against high-flying Newcastle United.