Ronald Koeman was not impressed with Everton s second-half performance against Sunderland despite going on to win the Premier League match 2-0 at Goodison Park on Saturday.
Everton were dominant in the first period and deserved their 1-0 lead at the break, after Idrissa Gueye scored his first goal for the club with a well-taken finish.
But rock-bottom Sunderland were brighter after the interval and Koeman believes that was as much down to his side s play as it was the visitors improvement.
Koeman also accepted that Everton got lucky when a late Jermain Defoe effort came back off the crossbar, just a few moments before Romelu Lukaku wrapped things up, in the process joining Duncan Ferguson on 60 goals as the club s joint top Premier League scorer.
It s three points and another clean sheet, he told the BBC. I was really pleased by the first 45 minutes, but not really happy about the second 45.
I think we dropped the tempo in the second half, and played more backwards than forwards.
| Rom went to Duncan discusses s goal-scoring milestone.
— Everton (@Everton)
We had one lucky moment, the shot of Defoe [which hit the bar]. There was a foul on Morgan Schneiderlin in the build-up, and the referee didn t whistle. But it was a lucky moment.
We did it to ourselves because we dropped the tempo in the second half.
For David Moyes the match was a first return to Goodison since a 2-0 defeat in April 2014, a result which sealed his fate at Manchester United, and he acknowledged Sunderland s first-half performance could not have been much worse.
I wanted to come here and frustrate them, and keep the crowd low-level. For long periods we did that, he told reporters.
But we didn t ever do anything really well with the ball. I was glad it was 1-0 at half-time because the boy [Tom Davies] hit the post just before.
We couldn t have played any worse than in the first half; I wanted them to be braver and I felt we did that [in the second half].
