Another manager bites the dust, but Marco Silva’s time in England has surely reached the endgame

On a bitter, cold, oddly gruelling Winter’s night, Marco Silva’s bitter, cold, oddly gruelling Everton tenure came to an end. 

For the neutral this was a brilliant sporting spectacle, the battle of Merseyside, blocks of red and blue chugging up and down the pitch under those brilliant white lights. For Everton fans this was simply the final straw, and so it turned out to be. 

The only thing shocking about his sacking on Thursday evening was that it came so deep into the season. It was oddly inevitable after a run of two wins in 10 that it would end at the hands of Liverpool, with Silva now being the fifth manager to lose his job after to defeat to Klopp’s Liverpool. 

Silva often has a harrowing look etched across his face but there was something disturbing about his Anfield demeanour, a man surely aware of the repercussions of another bruising defeat: dear old Marco, fronting up in his chalk rectangle, small and plump in his knee-length rain mac, arms flapping at the sides like broken deckchair struts. 

What took so long, Mr Kenwright? This sacking has been pencilled tentatively on the footballing calendar for weeks after no obvious signs of progression, no clear strategy, no signs of the deeper knots and snags starting to click. The time it took for this decision to come to fruition is almost as entirely strange as the decision to bring these two together in the first place. 

On the outside this is a young, ambitious, encouraging coach whos marriage with the Premier League was destined for the top. Yet in reality, Silva has now had three years in the top division with three clubs, all of whom are either in the relegation zone or have been relegated. 

On the surface it reads rather bleakly as 41 wins in 109 games. For some bizarre reason this is a manager who has been aggressively recruited for each of his clubs, with Farhad Moshiri, controversially, making him his personal pet project when pursuing him at Watford in October 2017. 

Over two years later and no real follower of the Silva years can say with any certainty his pattern of play, his style of management, tactics, managerial attributes. At the age of 42 he must still have some hope he can succeed, but will another club take the risk? I doubt it. 

It is easy for the decision makers to focus solely on the image, the fruitful idea of a young, foreign coach, investing in this well-tended disparate machine with all those high-spec parts on the outside but glued together without any real chemistry, pieces in the wrong places, no sense of pattern. 

Some will pour fretfully over the weaknesses of this Everton team, a porous defence, weak in the transitions, but this is the modern game where owners see footballing success through the prism of whoever is standing in that carefully marked out chalk rectangle. 

Despite a summer spending spree of £107.91m there are much deeper problems, starting at the top; the people recruiting these players, seemingly picking and choosing at young foreign talent, cherry picking at the European heavyweights dead-wood. 

This is an oddly brittle group of players, able to perform against Leicester last weekend, and then be torn apart by their archest rivals with no real fight, passion, desire. That inconsistency stems from the coaching zone, the belief in his plans.

This is a football club now under real pressure to get its next appointment right, to find someone tactically astute to bind these talented players together, before this club enters a parabola of decline which has haunted too many other footballing giants.