Samuel Aldrey / @SamuelAldrey
There was no earthquake at Goodison Park, but no FA Cup defeat or humiliation either. Boreham Wood, bidding to become only the second club from outside the league to reach the quarter-finals, made it very difficult for Everton before the superiority of the Premier League kicked in.
Salomón Rondón scored twice in the second half to lead Frank Lampard’s team to a round of 16 match at Crystal Palace.
They will need to improve this display significantly to reach the semi-finals at Wembley, but the night belonged to Luke Garrard and his consummate team.
The Hertfordshire club defended brilliantly throughout the match and underlined why they are firmly in the hunt for promotion to the Football League this season.
Frank Lampard’s team monopolized possession of the ball by 80 per cent and had more than 20 goal attempts.
But they had to wait until 12 minutes following the break – following a Lampard substitution at half-time, replacing debutant Nathan Patterson with Richarlison and ditching the three-man defense for an orthodox back – to get ahead.
Salomón Rondón scored the goal, finishing off a low cross from Jonjoe Kenny. And Rondón provided his side’s second goal six minutes from time, heading in Andros Townsend’s cross, despite efforts by Boreham Wood’s excellent goalkeeper Taye Ashby-Hammond to save the ball.
The night ended with the Everton crowd – who gave a standing ovation to every away player substituted in the second half – urging Rondón to add the goal that would have made him the first FA Cup hat-trick scorer at Goodison Park since Tommy Lawton in January 1939.
Rondón did not get his treble, but Everton booked their appointment at Selhurst Park, and gave their debut in the last minutes to the Academy duo, Isaac Price and Reece Welch.
Ukraine international Vitalii Mykolenko, signed by the club from Dinamo Kiev in January, was named captain for the night by Lampard. The Everton team came out with Ukrainian flags, as did the Boreham Wood players, and when the teams took to the pitch, the traditional Z-Cars chords were replaced by John Lennon’s Imagine.
ðâï¸Young Everton fan gets a shirt from Jonjoe Kenny. pic.twitter.com/FW8GQp28Ti
— Tony Scott (@Tony_Scott11) March 3, 2022
Both sets of players gathered behind a blue and yellow banner with a hopeful and moving line from the song. “Imagine all the people, share the whole world.”
Abroad, the entire MegaFon brand had been removed from the stadium following the suspension of Everton’s sponsorship deals with Russian companies backed by Alisher Usmanov, the oligarch close to the club’s majority shareholder, Farhad Moshiri, and who has been sanctioned by the EU and UK.
