Leighton Baines is enjoying learning new things under boss Roberto Martinez
He said: “It’s a work in progress but we’re working towards being a much better team. I’m enjoying that aspect of it. I’m learning and hopefully we will continue to build on what we’ve started.
“We’ve been working on different things and people have begun to enjoy watching some of them.
“Playing at Goodison in the first half last Monday night you can start to see it come together. We were brilliant in that game. We’ve just got to tighten up the other aspects and keep developing.
“The players that have come in have meant there’s room for rotation, horses for course where certain people are better suited to certain games. That’s where the manager is clever and knows that. Now we want to come back from the international break and get back to winning ways.”
“It’s always going to be a work in progress for a while and nobody is going to be at their best every week,” he said. “We’ve still got things we need to improve on. We gave the ball away too quickly high up the pitch to allow us to get any momentum.
“So every time we started to creep forward we’d lose it and that’d one of the thing we’re working on improving; being better in possession in the opposition’s half. It’s about sustaining attacks. Not doing it against City meant we kept ending up on the back foot again and susceptible to the counter attack.
“Whenever we tried to build up through the middle, which is one of the subtle changes in our way of playing at the moment, they had identified that and were quick to flood those areas when we tried to get it into Ross and Rom (Lukaku).
“That’s where we need to have the awareness to draw those players in then pop it out to wide areas. We need to still have a bit of both rather than just the middle. They had done their homework and did a good job.
“But we’re good enough to be aware of that in game. We shouldn’t have to just reflect on it afterwards. The next step tactically is to show that awareness during a game and say ‘OK we’ve seen what you’re doing,’ and then change, but we didn’t.”