Frank Lampard has accused Everton’s players of lacking ‘the bollocks to play’ after their abject FA Cup quarter-final exit.
Lampard’s side enjoyed a sustained spell of dominance in Sunday’s last-eight encounter with Crystal Palace before falling away and suffering a 4-0 defeat.
The manner of the Blues’ latest away-day reversal followed a similar theme to previous ones with their goals shipped from a succession of defensive errors.
And Lampard did not hold back in his assessment on events at Selhurst Park, just three days after Everton snatched a crucial win against Newcastle United.
He said: “There is only so much you can keep trying to butter someone up to get confidence.
“You’re playing at the cut-throat end of football; this is the FA Cup quarter-finals.
“If you haven’t got the confidence to play, you can flip it and say, ‘Have you got the bollocks to play?’ Apologies but that’s the football term.
“We didn’t play that badly today, Palace didn’t play that well. It was a lack of confidence, and a lack of what I just said. It wasn’t tactics.
“Palace couldn’t get out of their half in the first 20 minutes.”
The Everton manager also pointed to the failings of his predecessors when addressing the challenge of breaking such a seemingly deep-rooted issue.
“It’s a challenge because it’s been there quite a long time before I got here,” he added.
“I don’t have a magic wand to get inside people’s heads and change the resilience across a whole squad. That’s a work in progress.
“So we just have to work on that, as frustrating as it is for me and for the 4,000 fans who travelled down.”