Vitor Pereira is elite firefighter making mockery of Everton journalist’s Lampard comparison | OneFootball

Vitor Pereira has existed in the orbit of the Premier League for longer than most people would care to realise.

He was interviewed as a prospective replacement for David Moyes at Everton in 2013, was shortlisted in the post-Koeman hunt of 2017 and removed himself from the running to take over from Marco Silva in 2019, suitably chastened by the harrowingly dismissive combination of Harry Redknapp and Alan Brazil.

The Toffees were back again in 2022, when Rafael Benitez was sacked at the height of their existential crisis in trying to navigate a cold, brutal world without Moyes.

But the wider reaction put paid to that; Pereira was never going to win a popularity contest against Frank Lampard and probably didn’t even grasp the concept of relegation anyway.

That was the accusation from one journalist, who wrote at the time in a critique of Pereira’s credentials that ‘Lampard will at least understand the immediate challenge facing Everton to save themselves.’

Yet in the midst of his second successful dumpster fire mid-season parachuting in as many seasons, Pereira could actually be described as the most effective current Premier League firefighter.

It is a proud role which counts your Dyches, your Hodgsons and the Pulis’ of this world as previous incumbents who forged prosperous careers out of rescuing top-flight clubs from relegation. And for years it was a crucial part of the Premier League managerial ecosystem which seemed to have succumbed to extinction.

There was no obvious emergency responder when a struggling club reached for the phone in a February panic to avoid the Championship. The absurd crescendo to the 2022/23 season essentially rendered the function moot as Sam Allardyce, Dean Smith and Ruben Selles went down with sinking ships.

But Pereira has single-handedly revitalised it.

Nottingham Forest are a side transformed on his watch, Europa League semi-finalists who are pulling clear of the drop under the first manager to become a team’s fourth manager in a single Premier League season.

Their 5-0 dismantling of Sunderland equalled the record for this campaign’s biggest margin of victory – much like the six-game winning run he took Wolves on last season was the joint-best of any team.

Their subsequent capitulation upon not only starting this season with Pereira at the helm but granting him increased authority and power over their recruitment does not undermine the Portuguese but crystallises his place in the food chain: he is specifically a rescue artist and no more.

If you need Matheus Cunha or Morgan Gibbs-White to become the best player in the league for six months, or a large centre-forward to metamorphosise into a goal machine, but explicitly halfway through the season rather than from the very start, Pereira is your man.

Even just being linked with the Everton job for an entire decade has turned him into a survival specialist; it’s safe to assume Pereira ‘understands the immediate challenge’ of inheriting a lost team now.