Despite disappointing Deadline Day for Everton, there’s no reason to panic

Oh boy...

Going into Deadline Day, we all knew that Everton needed a striker and a defender. Neither happened. Talk about what this means for the club and whether we have actually turned a corner is going to go on a lot in the next few days, and the remaining difficult opening stretch of games in the Premier League is not going to make that any easier.

So just how far up the creek are we at this point? Well, there’s just no cover for Leighton Baines, other than shoehorning a less than impressive Cuco Martina into a left back slot, and the best striker on the roster is Sandro Ramirez.

This last part I’m not too worried about. Sandro is a good striker, and proved himself in an elite league last season with Malaga. He’s shown good things when healthy so far this season, he’s young, and he moves really well. He’s not a target man or a big name, but he can lead the line for a strong club sufficiently given how strong Everton’s defense is going to be.

That being said, Ronald Koeman can’t be happy and the fans have every right to be unhappy as well. However, there’s reason for optimism nonetheless and here’s why:

We’re getting Seamus Coleman and Yannick Bolasie back by Christmas.

Bolasie showed himself to be a really, really nice outside attacker before his injury last year, with Farhad Moshiri saying yesterday he would be back by October. We know how good Seamus is. Those two coming back will make us a deeper team with a lot of talent in wide areas.

Photo by Jan Kruger/Getty Images

We’ve shown we can make smart moves in January.

The most influential player on our current roster was a £20m buy of a player not happy with how the first half of his year was going. We could find Olivier Giroud or who knows who else in a similar boat in just a few months. At that time we’ll have an entire month to work out a workable deal for a good player.

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Arsenal is a bad joke.

As much as we are disappointed with how our window ended, Arsenal has set themselves up for an absolute disaster of a season. Things are already bad, and when January opens Arsenal’s best players will be looking to sign pre-contracts to get out of there. Wenger is a lame duck, and the fan base is on the brink of a riot every week.

All of this is not an environment for success. This is a team likely to implode. As we get healthier and stronger over the course of the year their lot is likely to get worse and worse, and in competition for top six places, that will work to our advantage.

Everybody breathe

Think of this window ending like getting knocked out of the EFL Cup. Not good, but not season defining either. Plenty of opportunities remain to make things right and do well. Starting Sandro will work fine until January, guys will get healthy, players will be cheaper, and our schedule starts to be a lot more generous after a couple more weeks. All in all, it’s still a good time to be a Toffee. Let’s wait and see how things unfold before we panic.