The last time Everton went to Turf Moor on April 6 last year, the then home manager Dyche told his Burnley players that the Blues didn’t “know how to win a game.” The words might have been cutting but there was a degree of truth in them and they worked.

Dyche delivered his proclamation during a half-time team talk when the Clarets were losing 2-1 after a Richarlison brace had cancelled out Nathan Collins’ opener. However, the balance in the dramatic seesaw encounter shifted again after the break as Jay Rodriguez equalised on 57 minutes before Maxwel Cornet struck an 85^th minute winner for the hosts.

For Everton, the collapse felt like a massive psychological blow going into the relegation run-in as they went from being potentially seven points clear of the Clarets to ending up just a single point above them with nine games to go. Dyche subsequently elaborated on his remarks when speaking to Sky Sports and said: “I’ve been down there, I know what it’s like and every season there have been tough patches for us.

“It’s hard to explain, but sometimes you sense that a team might have lost how to win a game. I said to them at half time: ‘I’m not sure these know how to win a game, away from home particularly.’”

While Dyche won the battle though, Everton won the war. The victory over the Blues proved to be the last victory of his nine-and-a-half year reign as Burnley manager.

Following a 2-0 defeat at bottom club Norwich City four days later, he was sacked on Good Friday, a decision that was widely-criticised and described by BBC Sport’s chief football writer and former ECHO journalist Phil McNulty as “blind panic.” Despite the Clarets bringing in Scouser Mike Jackson for the rest of the season with the caretaker boss taking 10 points from his first four matches, three defeats from their last four saw them go down on the final day as Leeds United survived with Everton of course having retained their Premier League status three days earlier thanks to their own nerve-jangling 3-2 comeback win against Crystal Palace.

Less than a year after taking the reins and healing the rifts of a divided club, Frank Lampard was unable to halt the Blues’ downward spiral though and with the club joint bottom of the table in late January this year and plummeting headfirst towards what would have been a first relegation in 72 years, Goodison Park chiefs made what to many had seemed like the obvious choice to save themselves and bring Dyche back into management. It’s understood that he was previously considered for the job back in 2017/18 when Ronald Koeman was sacked but in the season in which he would steer Burnley to seventh in the Premier League – their highest position since 1974 bringing a first return to European football since 1966/67 – Farhad Moshiri opted for Sam Allardyce instead.

Allardyce, a manager who Dyche sometimes gets lazily compared with – even though he’s pragmatic enough to acknowledge: “why fight the box you’re put in?” – endured a short but not-so-sweet reign at Goodison Park before Moshiri went back to his original choice Marco Silva. The Portuguese coach got his cards 18 months later with Everton back in the relegation zone so the club’s majority shareholder with a compulsion for stars in a region he dubbed football’s “new Hollywood”, abandoned plans to bring back David Moyes by hiring the biggest blockbuster name in the business, Carlo Ancelotti.

For once it wasn’t the legendary Italian who raised a quizzical eyebrow but the rest of the game as the silverware-collecting nomad who had won major honours in all of Europe’s big five leagues but other than Milan hadn’t stayed anywhere longer than two years over a career in the dugout stretching back to 1995, penned a lucrative four-and-a-half year contract. Like all of Moshiri’s eight managers in seven years though, Ancelotti didn’t even make it to the two-year point as it all ended in tears for the Blues after just 18 months – most of which were played behind closed doors due to coronavirus restrictions – when he defected back to Real Madrid to return to his natural habitat of massaging galacticos’ egos.

Being left in the lurch prompted Moshiri to ignore the warnings of other Goodison Park chiefs and embark on the most-controversial appointment in the history of the most-passionate city in English football in the shape of former Liverpool boss Rafael Benitez. Chronic results rather than previous employment across Stanley Park proved to be the Spaniard’s downfall though and the same went for his more-popular successor Frank Lampard, someone who came with universal backing within the boardroom.

Even in January this year though with Everton joint bottom of the Premier League and hurtling towards a first relegation in 72 years, Moshiri was prepared to go rogue again, setting his sights on veteran Argentinian coach Marcelo Bielsa. Living up to his nickname, ‘El Loco’ is understood to have wanted to work with the Blues’ youngsters until the summer though – by which point the Blues would have been in the Championship – before taking charge of the senior side so it was Bill Kenwright’s choice of Dyche, that proved to be the parting gift to the club he loved from the late chairman whose life will be celebrated in a memorial service at Liverpool Cathedral on Monday.

For all the wildly varying profiles and football philosophies of the many incumbents of Goodison Park’s home dugout during the current regime, Dyche – despite being a self-confessed boyhood Kopite from afar – is proving himself to be the most natural fit for Evertonians since Kenwright plucked Moyes from Preston North End back in 2002. There was a brief and spectacularly effective fusion of the Scot’s solidity with a Catalan’s creativity a decade ago during Roberto Martinez’s first season but it soon fizzled out and for all that optimistic Blues initially proclaimed that the School of Science “was on its way back,” the Grand Old Lady has never truly had a taste for slow-paced tiki-taka.

For all their continuing trauma or recent times, both on and off the field, Everton are on to a really good thing for Dyche who referenced his growing bond with the Goodison Park faithful ahead of this game by saying: “I think we’ve reconnected in a very authentic way” and although new owners of football clubs are often itching to bring in a manager of their own choice – often unnecessarily – 777 Partners seemingly realise that with their sporting director Johannes Spors singing the 52-year-old’s praises. As the Blues boss himself also proclaimed ahead of his first return to Turf Moor since being sacked by Burnley: “When I got here I went: ‘Right, OK, how can we add that formula, those winning edges?’ It is not just tactics, it is not just quality, it is also the team feel of how you win games, the understanding and learning of how to win games – and I think it is a learned skill.”