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.

“He would just sit there and listen. But then he said something back to me in the changing room one day, and the lads were like, ‘Hey up, when did you sign?’