By Daniel Feliciano

25th May, 2023 | 3:38pm

Everton wanted to replace Sean Dyche with Patrick Vieira since he got sacked by Crystal Palace

Everton made Patrick Vieira an offer to replace Sean Dyche as manager of the club after he was sacked by Crystal Palace, according to L’Equipe.

The Toffees sacked Frank Lampard in January and brought in former Burnley boss Dyche to help them avoid relegation from the Premier League, which they can confirm with a victory over Bournemouth on the final day of the season.

But according to a new report the club were looking at replacing Dyche with former Arsenal captain Vieira after his sacking in London in March, but the Frenchman turned them down.

“Since his dismissal on March 17, Patrick Vieira has received three proposals from Premier League clubs that were in difficulty (Leeds, Everton, Leicester),” Foot Mercato wrote (25 May). 

“According to L’Equipe, he turned down these offers as he did not want to join a struggling club and wanted to give himself time.”

Surely not

Reading that report written down smells like absolute nonsense, but would anyone really be surprised by this Everton board doing something so crazy?

Dyche started off well and then the team hit a little bit of a rut, but that is to be expected when you’re down at the bottom of the table battling for your life.

Ultimately Dyche has proven to be the right man to step in as he has put us in a position where our destiny is in our own hands ahead of the final game at Goodison Park, and we couldn’t really have asked for anything more at this point.

Vieira got sacked rather harshly by Palace after a horror run of results where the fixture list put them against all the top sides in the division in a row, but he would have been expecting to get them out of that mess as comfortably as Roy Hodgson did.

It’s probably a good thing that he did turn us down if this is true, because it would have just caused far more uproar and mess than necessary in an already crazy season.