Behind The Mask

Dominic Calvert-Lewin has followed an unconventional and rapid route to the top of English football. Everton magazine spoke to some of the people who know the Toffees forward best – and discovered the secrets underpinning Calvert-Lewin’s startling two-year rise from League Two loanee to Goodison Park favourite

- Paul Mcnamara

Paul Simpson assembled his 21-strong battalion, ready for their assault on world glory.

The England Under-20s manager and his players had been separated for only two months. But Simpson detected a change in one of his young bucks.

Following a Four Nations competition in France, Dominic Calvert-Lewin had featured in a handful of games for Everton, maintaining an upward trajectory that has characterised the 20-year-old’s embryonic career.

“There had been a huge growing-up process,” Simpson tells Everton magazine. “He was always a sensible bloke, but he seemed to really grow up over that period when he was regularly involved with Everton’s first team.

“He is a really good character who, judging by the way he went about things, had obviously had a good upbringing in football.”

That upbringing, in fact, is littered with similar tales. Simpson was merely becoming acquainted with the CalvertLewin familiar to a plethora of the player’s managers and coaches – past and present – prepared to form a figurative queue around the block to deliver their testimony on this athletic young footballer, blessed with a ferocious work ethic and endearingly grounded attitude.

The exponential maturation in him detected by Simpson, unbeknown to the young Lions’ boss, was par for the course.

Calvert-Lewin learns, adapts and improves. Just ask Bira Dembele. And Ryan Cresswell, too, for that matter.

“He was shy and never really said much, initially,” says Cresswell, who shared both a flat and countless car journeys with Calvert-Lewin, during the rookie forward’s five-month loan spell with Northampton Town.