Benitez gives cryptic assessment on Everton midfielder’s future

Speaking at his latest press conference Rafa Benitez revealed that Everton midfielder Jean-Philippe Gbamin has a ‘complicated’ future.

It’s hard to know exactly what Benitez means by this rather cryptic statement and what it actually means for the Everton midfield star’s future at Goodison Park. But, it doesn’t seem particularly positive that’s for sure.

The Toffees’ boss has said that Gbamin’s return to the first-team certainly didn’t go as well as hoped (which is pretty obviously the case) and particularly his laboured efforts against Wolves a few weeks ago when his struggles seemed to sybolise the profound problems with this team.

Gbamin would surely be a contender to the title of the Premier League’s unluckiest footballer. He has had a quite extraordinary run of injury problems and he has missed almost two years because of them since he joined Everton.

His lack of fitness has perhaps been a major reason why the team has declined so much over the past few years as the enegetic midfield presence he was signed to bring has been absent since Idrissa Gueye departed for PSG.

The Ivorian international was bought to replace Gueye but he hasn’t had the chance to show if he can and now after so many injuries and such a long time on the sidelines it’s an open quesiton as whther he can ever deliver what he was signed to do.

Gbamin’s problems were part of the reason why the Blues’ decided to bring in Abdoulaye Doucoure in the 2020 summer transfer window.

Last season we saw an inhibited Doucoure who was constrained by Carlo Ancelotti’s tactics and more importantly the failings of the side around him as the Toffees’ weakenesses were exposed by a succession of injuries that affected every member of the first-team squad at some point.

This time round almost the same thing has happened with a bright start undermined by simply unbelievable bad luck again.

This season he’s been released much more by Benitez and it was working well until the Frenchman inevitably succumbed to the Everton injury curse.

This led to Gbamin perhaps being rushed back too quickly and it showed. Unfortunately, his injury problems seem intractable and it now looks like he will never show the sort of form that prompted the club to spend so much money on him two years ago.