Already missing Jean-Philippe Gbamin, Andre Gomes and Morgan Schneiderlin through injury and with Fabian Delph not guaranteed to be available as he was only in light training, Duncan Ferguson’s central midfield options were limited to say the least ahead of the trip to Manchester United on Sunday.
The 47-year-old caretaker manager may well have chosen to go with Gylfi Sigurdsson and Tom Davies in the middle of the park against Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s men.
But when the team news was confirmed it revealed that the former had been ruled out through illness, leaving the latter as the only recognised senior central midfielder available.
Despite being yet to play a Premier League minute this term under Marco Silva and only appearing on the bench on two occasions against West Ham United and Norwich City, Beni Baningime surely would have fancied his chances of being named in the starting XI – or at least on the bench at Old Trafford – given the lack of options available to the big Scot.
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However, Ferguson made his feelings pretty clear on the 21-year-old as he didn’t make the matchday 18 at all, with a defender in Mason Holgate preferred alongside Davies in the middle of the park and no central midfielder included on the substitutes’ bench.
That must have been quite the blow for a player who has featured for the first team on 12 occasions previously, including in the Europa League under David Unsworth and Sam Allardyce back in 2017 when he was clearly considered good enough despite his teander age.
This match against United will be remembered for the snub delivered by the caretaker boss to Moise Kean having brought him on in the 70th minute and then taken him off again in the 88th, but it was hardly a glowing endorsement of the quality of a player two years older than the Italian either.
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The fact that Holgate shone and drew praise from Toffees supporters on Twitter would hardly have gone down well either.
Baningime must be wondering what the future holds for him now because if he couldn’t even get selected for this encounter, then surely there doesn’t appear to be much of a future for him at Goodison Park.
In other Everton news, The Athletic have dropped a major bombshell about the Toffees and Moise Kean in the aftermath of Sunday’s fiasco