James Garner and Amadou Onana could return for Everton v Chelsea, Sean Dyche shares Jordan Pickford fitness update
Sean Dyche has shared an injury update ahead of Chelsea’s visit to Goodison Park to take on Everton in the Premier League on Sunday.
The Toffees claimed a 3-0 win over Newcastle despite James Garner and Amadou Onana missing the game through injury, while goalkeeper Jordan Pickford needed treatment on a knee injury during the game too.
But the boss has confirmed that he hopes to be able to have Garner and Onana back available for the game, while Pickford is expected to be fine while the medical team will check over Seamus Coleman after he lasted for 65 minutes on his return after seven months out.
“With Jimmy [Garner] I hope because it’s a sickness bug, of course you never know, but they can pass very quickly as we all know,” he said. “We’ve all had one for 24 hours. There are some longer ones, we hope it’s a 24 hour situation.
“He’d have time to get food back in himself and feel stronger again.
“Amadou [Onana] we’re hoping will be around it. Possibly in the squad we’ll just have to wait and see how training goes over the next couple of days.
“We’ll check on Seamus tomorrow [Friday].
“He [Pickford] just got a niggly thing on his knee, we’ll find out more tomorrow [Friday]. I don’t like to talk about it until I find out 24/48 hours later, but I don’t think it’s anything too serious.”
Boost
In recent years it’s not a crime to say that Everton have really struggled to pick up results if any key players were missing games for one reason or another.
Dominic Calvert-Lewin is the most obvious case of this, but Dyche has made it a real squad game at Goodison since his arrival and the team have found solutions without key members of the squad on several occasions.
Onana hasn’t played for almost a month but the team have responded well in his absence, while Garner’s illness being thrown onto the team at the last minute on Thursday made little difference and the team claimed a comfortable win in the end.
With Chelsea coming to town this weekend and a quick turnaround between games having those players back available again can only be a positive thing, while Coleman’s return was a positive too.
As for Pickford the hope is that he will be absolutely fine and he seemed to be okay celebrating after the win over Newcastle, so fingers crossed there are no surprises with that one.
In other Everton news, Paul Merson has predicted the result of the clash v Chelsea on Sunday.