Goodison Park under the lights is a special place to be. Every sense is heightened that extra notch, the decibels have gone from the norm to a jet engine during takeoff, the crowd is collectively more fervent.
But good ol’ Goodison has a distasteful monkey on its back that it just can’t shake. Roberto Martinez moving to Merseyside with a head full of hair and leaving sporting the Lee Carsley look is just one example.
Injuries are Everton’s Kryptonite. It started off as a little bit of a coincidence but every single decent player the Ev get their hands on is cursed. Their legs turn into papier-mâché. It’s cruel, wretched and Blues fans must be left counting their sins – but sometimes, it’s kind of…laughable.
Let’s see which hapless players have fallen under the Everton injury curse.
We’ll start with the most recent one. Everton signed Ivorian defensive midfielder from Mainz 05 for £22.5m in August 2019, an urgent replacement for Idrissa Gana Gueye. JPG played a total of 135 minutes before sustaining a thigh injury that eventually ruled him out for the season.
Expected back for the remaining nine games, JPG has recently picked up a non-contact Achilles injury playing foot-tennis, ruling him out until 2021. That’s almost £167k per minute of football so far – ouch.
Bernard joined Everton in August 2018 and it took a bit longer for the curse to strike him than it did to Gbamin. October arrived and Bernard suffered knee ligament damage after a slip on the turf.
The sniper got him, as your dad would say. He missed the next four games, which isn’t too bad all things considered.
Now, James Vaughan came through as a kid at Everton so it’s a little different from the others who have signed for big money. Nevertheless, Vaughan broke records on his debut becoming the Premier League’s youngest scorer and Everton’s youngest top-flight scorer.
