Aznou vs Mykolenko: the left-back question Moyes needs to answer

Second half, Murrayfield. Everton work it neatly out of defence, George slips it to Aznou, and he drives on and whips in a dangerous cross.

Blocked, nothing came of it. But it was more end product down that flank than Everton had managed in the hour before it.

Aznou came on for Mykolenko on 74 minutes with the game already dead and buried, and it took him next to no time to show more going forward than Everton’s first-choice left-back had all night.

Mykolenko wasn’t bad. He got his clearances in and did the basics. But there was nothing going forward, and his form this pre-season hasn’t been good enough to earn him an automatic spot.

This isn’t new.

Aznou’s best pre-season outing came in a start against Dundee United, where he was a constant help down the left for Tyrique George, and decent again against Bolton. Since then, he’s been stuck with late cameos — Stoke, Hamburg, Stuttgart, now Newcastle — while Mykolenko keeps starting regardless.

So the question stands.

Aznou arrived from Bayern Munich for around £8m last summer with good pedigree behind him — La Masia, the Bayern first team, three caps for Morocco. He’s not behind Mykolenko in that pecking order by accident.

Moyes has had a year to look at him properly and still hasn’t given him a run of starts in a position Everton need sorting. Mykolenko is steady enough, but he offers so little going forward that it drags down whoever’s playing ahead of him.

None of that settles anything, of course.

One good cameo against a Newcastle side who’d made nine changes doesn’t make Aznou the answer, and there are questions about how he holds up defensively against the Premier League’s finest.

But Palace are up in ten days, and Mykolenko – four seasons in – still hasn’t done enough to convince anyone (maybe apart from Moyes), and the case for starting Aznou and finding out is only getting stronger.