Everton win an amazing (and terrible) game of football - The Warm-Up

We start with a question. Was Everton 1-0 Newcastle the worst game of the season? It all depends, perhaps, on how you feel about football. Do you like to see it played, and played well? Do you like to see well-organised teams tussling with one another, do you like to see the very best players playing at the top of their ability, do you like to see thrilling attacking, stout defending, brain and body working as one? Because, yeah, there wasn't a whole lot of that.

Everton started at 100 miles an hour, and that lasted for about five minutes until the adrenaline wore off. Then Newcastle established themselves, and the game had descended into a messy festival of minor fouls and overhit passes, flapping arms and pointing fingers. Newcastle looked a little better organised, or perhaps just a little more confident; Everton looked up for it but not entirely sure of how to turn that into anything like a chance. The visitors' penalty area, in the absence of what you might call a proper striker, remained largely untroubled. Martin Dubravka organised his receipts and cleared out the cupboard under the sink.

Watching poor teams play poor football is one thing. In theory both these teams are at least adequately decent, by the standards of the league and set against one another, which only made the lack of coherence more frustrating. Sometimes, a game that remains goalless for an hour or so can be described as "one for the purists". This was one for nobody at all. Not even referees.

But as an alternative suggestion: was this the best game of the season? Nothing much happened, sure, but nothing much happened with great intensity. Some games sag, and quietly collapse, and pass away with an apologetic sigh. This one crackled with nervous energy, as the crowd roared and seethed and howled and the referee whistled and whistled and whistled.

Quality? Not much. Yet it remained compelling: every failed attack and misplaced pass felt heavy and important. Goodison Park wound itself up and wound itself up further and then, in the one thousandth minute of injury time, Alex Iwobi and Dominic Calvert-Lewin remembered that they were very good footballers and produced three perfect seconds of football, and the place went off like a jubilant volcano.

Also some lad cable-tied himself to one of the posts. It turned out that he was protesting fossil fuels rather than Everton, though the fact it wasn't immediately clear says a lot about how things have been going at Goodison. Out came a man carrying a large pair of aged blue boltcutters that completely lacked a cutting edge; this game was so alive that the metaphors became real. And do Everton score if there's a normal amount of injury time? We're saying not. Give the lad an assist.

Little was good about the game, yet almost everything was perfect. Even Allan's dismissal worked for the spectacle. 10 years ago that tackle would have earned him a booking; 20 years ago, the referee would have given him a firm handshake and a word of congratulation. But if you slow it down and spin it round and tweak the colour levels and put 'O Fortuna' over the top and run it backward and stop it just there? No, one more frame. There. Nasty. Could be a red?

So, new theory. Was this the most important game of the season? Very possibly, at least at this end of the table. If team spirit is an illusion glimpsed in the aftermath of victory, then the stuff that gets bottled after that kind of win — ragged but feisty performance, yammering crowd, officiating that seems to hate you, 14 minutes of stoppage time, late goal, limbs limbs limbs — must be paint-stripping rocket fuel.

Everton still have a monstrously difficult run in: two of their remaining 11 games are trips to Watford and Burnley, the two teams directly below them, and they also have to play five of the current top six. There's a trip to Anfield in there, which could be an unpleasant day out. But last night's sizzling atmosphere could so easily have curdled into something poisonous. A little more nous from Newcastle in the first half, a little more luck in the second, and all that energy could have come out as booing instead of delirious screaming. Everton aren't safe yet. Not by a long way. But they've kept the crowd, and they've stopped the slide, and they've finally conjured something — a feeling, an energy, a have-that-the-lot-of-you triumph — for Frank Lampard to work with. And that is precisely what they needed.

This is how the Europa happens, if you're not particularly invested in one team or other. It becomes a rolling stream of events, all related by the competition but all taking place in different locations, with different people wearing different coloured shirts. It's quite overwhelming in the early knock-out stages, hitting the general viewer rather like cake hits a toddler. For four hours you run around shouting "Football!" and then suddenly you collapse, exhausted.

And so the Warm-Up would like to formally thank West Ham and Sevilla for taking their game to extra-time, meaning we actually got to watch some of it after Everton-Newcastle ran long. And on the basis of extra-time, West Ham looked seriously good value for their win, Michael Antonio looked completely unplayable, and Declan Rice looked like the best midfielder in Europe. So that's all nice.

Every time we flicked over to Leicester against Rennes the players were pushing and shoving and the referee was waving his arms around while everybody ignored him. From this we conclude that Leicester put in a highly professional performance, controlled the game, and frustrated the opposition. Obviously we can't say for certain that this was all down to the return of Wesley Fofana, but we're going to assume so until somebody proves otherwise.

This inability to follow anything properly is, to be clear, a good thing. (For the Europa follower, not the toddler.) If we must have too much football, as apparently we must, then make a virtue of it. Make it all happen at the same time. Make it impossible to follow. The Champions League is the big, sensible competition for big, sensible teams; the Europa is the sugar rush. Long may it zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The England manager is always an impossible job, but impossibility comes in different flavours. The howling fury of the tabloid press appears to have ebbed a little, damped down by Gareth Southgate's stolid professionalism. But there's a new problem, a better but still awkward problem: Southgate has too many good players to choose from.

This affords him some space to experiment, of course. The most interesting name in the latest squad, announced yesterday, is that of Trent Alexander-Arnold, and not just because it's quite long and has a hyphen. This selection suggests that Southgate is, perhaps, going to try something different. Asking Alexander-Arnold to pretend to be Kyle Walker (rested) or Kieran Trippier (injured) would be an appalling waste. Ask him to do the stuff he does better than anybody else, which is, roughly speaking, playing like David Beckham after starting a few yards further back. Southgate's game plan hasn't so far had space for such a player, but perhaps he's realised it might be a good idea to try and make one.

The most interesting absences are those of Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho, although we understand the thinking. Frankly, Southgate hasn't gone far enough: there's no way we'd have anybody from Manchester United anywhere near this squad. What if it's contagious? Send them on holiday. Send them home. Send them to a log cabin in the woods with no internet and no phone signal. Everybody involved with England's silliest big club needs a good long break, and if the season won't allow it, the international break must be pressed into service.

This would also help Southgate avoid awkward questions like "Why have you picked Harry Maguire, currently trapped inside a nightmare filled with rakes, and not Fikayo Tomori, currently top of Serie A?" Or "Luke Shaw, and not another right-back? Who are you and what have you done with the real Gareth Southgate?" But then, as noted, there are too many decent players and only 25 spots to fill. We're all just tinkering on the edges here. England squad announcements just aren't what they used to be.

Yes, fair enough, he has caught this quite nicely.

This delightful piece from the Athletic opens with the claim that only one game in the history of English league football has ever been abandoned because a team had too many players sent off or injured. And we thought: that can't be right! There's been loads of games! But then we couldn't find another one, so we bow to the greater knowledge of Richard Sutcliffe and Steve Madeley. Here's their oral history of the Battle of Bramall Lane. That Georges Santos tackle really is just as bad as you remember it.

Your supersoaraway Premier League fixture tonight is overachieving Wolves against underachieving Leeds. In Spain, Athletic Bilbao host Getafe; in Italy, Genoa welcome Torino; and in France it's Saint-Etienne against Troyes.