Towards the end of last season, Everton looked poised for a serious breakthrough. In the last eight rounds of the Premier League, only Manchester City and Liverpool took more points than Marco Silva’s side.

Everton won five games, kept six clean sheets, and their expected-goals differential — a measure of the quality of chances a team creates minus the quality of chances they concede — was second in the league, behind only City. Gylfi Sigurdsson was pulling the strings, Michael Keane was beginning to look like an elite centre back, and the team were playing the sort of polished, cohesive football that only a truly excellent coach can orchestrate. After an inconclusive start, the appointment of Silva, an exciting but polarising young manager, had been