Everton's fragile confidence has been undermined further by confirmation that Lee Carsley has been ruled out for a further six weeks after undergoing a second operation to repair medial knee ligament damage. The midfielder's prolonged absence will add to the gloom at Everton who lie bottom of the Premiership and have been knocked out of both European competitions.
In the wake of the 2-0 defeat at Manchester City on Sunday - their ninth in 12 competitive games this season - Everton's manager David Moyes cancelled the players' rest-day yesterday and called them in for training with daunting fixtures against Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea coming after the international break.
Carsley, 31, suffered ligament damage during the 3-2 defeat at Bolton on the final day of last season and had surgery in the summer. The problem flared up during a pre-season match against Fenerbahce in Istanbul and his rehabilitation has been hampered since, with the surgeon confirming that a piece of the ligament had failed to heal as well as had been hoped.
He went into surgery for a second time on Friday to repair the problem. "For some reason, the ligament had been repeatedly strained," Mick Rathbone, Everton's physiotherapist, said. "It was healing, but it wasn't re-attaching itself to the bone so the surgeons pinned it back to the bone, sutured it and, hopefully, that is the end of it. It simply wasn't going to heal without the second operation. They are now talking six weeks before he's back, and the surgeons are the experts."
In his absence Phil Neville has been asked to play Carsley's deep-lying midfield role and Everton will be relieved at confirmation that the England utility player will not be sanctioned by the Football Association after appearing to lash out with his boot at the City midfielder Lee Croft. The referee Mark Halsey is understood to have seen the incident and deemed it not worthy of punishment.
That leaves Neville available for the trip to White Hart Lane on October 15 as Moyes's side attempt to revive a flagging campaign. "Our next home game is against Chelsea and we have to believe that we can get something out of that, but we have to get something at Tottenham," Joseph Yobo said. "We need to stop losing games. It's not clicking for us, but a draw or a win will turn it all around. If we can do it against one of the big teams, so much the better."
Meanwhile, Kevin Ratcliffe, Everton's former captain, has traced the club's decline to the sale of the midfielder Thomas Gravesen to Real Madrid in January "They had a great start to last season. But if you look at their form from February onwards, when Gravesen left, it was pretty poor - and relegation standard then," he said. "People say the alarm bells aren't ringing at Everton. But when you're languishing at the bottom and your next two games are at Tottenham and then home to Chelsea you can't see them getting too many points from those games."