Grealish gives Everton reason to feel something even before stunning late Maitland-Niles equaliser | OneFootball

Eight years after scoring his first Premier League goal, Ainsley Maitland-Niles scored his second to snatch a point for Everton against Manchester United in a game that spent 80 minutes proving an awful lot of what we thought we knew about these two sides and 15 minutes tearing it all apart.

It does feel like a significant early moment in both sides’ seasons, stalling any early post-Hull momentum for United while also showing Everton that this need not be a season of drab existing rather than meaningful living.

For most of this match, Everton looked – understandably and predictably – short of ideas and confidence. They looked like a side that had endured a difficult and disappointing transfer window, one that has left them as a side with little evidence of joy.

David Moyes has spoken about trying to get Brennan Johnson back to his Tottenham days after his barren Crystal Palace spell, but even that misses the point. What he means is back to his Ange Postecoglou Tottenham days. His winning-goal-in-Europa League-finals Tottenham days. There was a reason Spurs were so happy to sell him halfway through last season.

He was utterly anonymous again here, as he has been really since the very earliest days of last season, before Thomas Frank had fully completed the task of removing all hope and enjoyment out of a Tottenham squad that even after a mass replacement still hasn’t relocated it.

He might not go eight years between Premier League goals but it is now well past a year since he scored in both games as Spurs won their first two games of the season under Frank last August.

An awful lot has happened since then.

Everton’s late transformation in this game could be traced directly to the now joyless Johnson being replaced midway through the second half by Jack Grealish, a man whose impishness remains and whose loan return to the Hill Dickinson is a significant shaft of light through the gloom.

There was still a freakish element to Everton’s twin comebacks, of course. It’s probably not sustainable to rely on long-range bins-seekers from your left-back to grab points. And Tyrique George’s earlier equaliser was hardly a high-percentage chance, either.

They were two stunning goals, but there was also no doubting the change that came over the stadium when Grealish was introduced. The mood was shifted. There was light where darkness had been descending. There was a belief that something good could come of this game where no such belief felt present before.

Even had this game still ended in defeat, that change in the atmosphere would have been real and significant. Just the idea of Grealish versus the reality of Johnson at a post-Iliman Ndiaye Everton might be enough to save them from a season of pure drudgery. With a bit of help from Hayden Hackney too, on this evidence.

As for United, they spent most of the game playing their role to perfection: good, but not convincingly or compellingly so. A just-doing-enough kind of good. At half-time it felt like a game that was there for them to go out and win, and it looked like that was precisely what they would do after Bryan Mbeumo’s near instant strike at the start of the second half.

But they, like pretty much everyone else, hadn’t reckoned with the goalscoring threat of Ainsley Maitland-Niles.