Everton must keep Jack Grealish benched to protect David Moyes's joyless masterpiece

Look at the second-half goal that separated the two sides. Thierno Barry didn't ask for a localized heatmap before he put the ball in the net. He simply reacted. He saw an opening against a Newcastle side that had already begun to mentally disintegrate, and he took it. That is what happens when a dressing room is freed from the burden of trying to produce viral highlight clips for social media.

Meanwhile, on the home bench, Matthias Jaissle is supposedly nursing another "headache." I should think he is. The Newcastle manager is currently discovering what happens when a high-pressing philosophy collides with a squad that simply doesn't want to run anymore.

You have to laugh at the spreadsheet merchants. Variance? I’ll tell you what variance is: variance is Jacob Ramsey getting sent off late in the game for Newcastle because he couldn't handle the physical reality of a Moyes masterclass. That red card wasn't a statistical anomaly. It was the inevitable result of a pampered modern squad lashing out at a system built on good old-fashioned Scottish pragmatism.

Moyes has built a fortress of grit, and he has done it by excising the glamour. I sat next to a former top-flight center-half on a flight back from Dubai last month, and he told me that the only way to fix a broken club is to make the players hate you, hate the training ground, and hate the very concept of joy. Only then do they truly bond. Moyes clearly understands this. Grealish, with his infectious smile and his desire to actually enjoy his profession, is a threat to that fragile ecosystem.

If I were sitting in the Everton boardroom right now—and frankly, given the decisions they've made over the last decade, they could do a lot worse than pulling up a chair for me—I would be making it very clear to the manager that the current formula is sacred. You do not mess with the chemistry of a team that has successfully figured out how to win against ten men by a single goal.

Grealish will just have to wait his turn, perhaps by watching Barry from the stands and taking notes on how to properly clear a ball into row Z when the situation demands it. As for Newcastle, Jaissle can take all the aspirin he wants. Until he learns to stop treating a football pitch like a chessboard and starts treating it like a muddy trench, the headaches are only going to get worse.