At times of uncertainty, with a fork firmly in the road ahead, it would not be unusual to see a struggle for power.

Everton’s boardroom may be split over who their next permanent manager should be, but it’s admirable that - at least in public - Bill Kenwright and Farhad Moshiri’s supposed differences in direction haven’t spilled over into anything.

Nothing, that is, except inaction.

Clearly, the Toffees’ board wasn’t expecting to have to sack Ronald Koeman, and so the search for a new manager was not supposed to be on the cards, and that seems to have been the problem. You can see the confusion just by looking at the names they appear to have come up with: Marco Silva, Sam Allardyce, Sean Dyche and Thomas Tuchel seem to have very little in common as managers, and putting them altogether in one sentence smacks of a little bit of desperation. At the very least, it shows that they have no clear idea of what they actually want.

To some extent that’s normal. When you sack a manager in October, you end up having to scrape around a little bit for a replacement. The good managers aren’t available because they already have jobs, and so the list of replacements for the man you’ve fired is always going to be headed ‘whoever’s available’.

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Perhaps that’s why Kenwright is said to favour keeping David Unsworth in the job until the summer when a higher-profile replacement can be found, whilst Moshiri appeared to favour asking a firefighter like Sam Allardyce to take the job for a similar sort of time period.

That has seen Allardyce rule himself out, and you can see why. This was a man whose stock was so high over a year ago that he was given the England manager’s job. He clearly feels as though he has earned the right to be a long-term candidate for a job like that at Everton and you get the feeling he’s right: and not because he’s such a great manager, but also because short-term moves like this one don’t tend to solve all that much.

That’s the reason why Everton have missed a massive opportunity here.

The international break is the perfect time to pick a replacement manager. West Ham have done it most recently by adding David Moyes in the middle of a break. It gives the new manager time to come into the club and figure things out: he has plenty of time to assess his squad and staff, come up with a training schedule, work without interruption with the players who aren’t off with national teams and, when the internationals come back, there’s already momentum in place to enable everyone to hit the ground running before the season starts again.

Everton missed this window twice. They could have sacked Koeman earlier, and then when they did finally do it, they missed the next break, too. And now, even if they do stick with Unsworth until the end of the season, they’ve missed a shot at the momentum that it would have given them if they’d announced him as at least a semi-permanent coach last week.

Whether or not he would have done anything differently is beside the point - the point is the mental and emotional difference it would have made to get this sorted out. The longer it goes on, the less authority Unsworth has, and the more the players feel like they’re holding on until the board makes a decision. That’s just human nature.

That doesn’t mean that they’ve made entirely the wrong call by not just appointing an interim manager or even by acceding to Sam Allardyce’s rumoured demands to be given a long-term contract instead of a short-term one until the end of the season.

But it does mean they’ve missed a trick by not using the international break to their advantage by making sure it was a springboard for success. It could have been such a welcome momentum changer before the Christmas period on the horizon, but instead, Everton are just plodding along in the same way they have done since Koeman’s departure.

The Watford victory could well prove to be a turning point for the Toffees this season, but it’s just as likely that the missed opportunity the subsequent two weeks presented will define it instead.

https://video.footballfancast.com/video-2015/owen-quotes.mp4