Everton coming from behind to beat Coventry 3-1 and climbing to fifth is being read in some corners as proof David Moyes has been underrated all along. That reading gets it backwards. This is proof Thierno Barry is an outstanding striker doing the work of two or three players, because Everton don't currently have two or three players capable of doing it alongside him.
Everton trailed to Yann Gboho's goal, equalised, then went ahead through Barry, and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall put it beyond doubt late on. Barry's double took him to ten goals in all competitions this season, already past the total he managed in the whole of last season. That's a genuinely brilliant run of form from a player who, before kickoff, already had one of the better underlying numbers in the league relative to how few goals he'd actually scored. None of that is in dispute, and none of it happened because of anything Moyes did on the pitch. Barry did it himself.
What Moyes is actually responsible for is the situation that made Barry necessary in the first place. Everton went into this season having let Iliman Ndiaye, Tim Iroegbunam, Beto and Nathan Patterson all leave in the same summer window, failed to land a replacement striker after a deadline-day move for Folarin Balogun collapsed, and are now, by Moyes's own admission, working with what he's called a small squad. Beto's departure means Barry is the only senior recognised striker on the books. When people point to this win as evidence Moyes is doing more with less, they're actually describing the problem. Doing more with less is fine right up until the less breaks down, and right now the less is one twenty-four-year-old who has to be brilliant every single week because there's no alternative plan if he has an off night or picks up a knock.
Everton were a goal down and had to be rescued, and anyone who watched it saw a performance with real vulnerable stretches. That's a legitimate complaint about the team's balance, and the final score doesn't erase it. It cuts against the vindication case: a team that keeps needing a rescue act is leaning on one brilliant individual performance to bail it out.
Moyes deserves credit: he's kept a thin, unsettled squad competitive and within touching distance of the European places through a quarter of the season, with no incoming business of note and, by his own account, no January plan in place either, because the club is up for sale and nobody above him is making decisions. That's a real achievement in circumstances that would have plenty of managers losing the dressing room. Building a team that wins games like this comfortably is a different achievement, and conflating the two lets the people who actually run Everton off the hook for a transfer window that left their manager with a squad held together by one player's form.
If Barry gets injured tomorrow, this team's results swing the other way fast, and everyone currently crowning Moyes knows it. The credit for this result belongs to Barry.
