Ronald Koeman was not impressed with Everton's second-half performance against Sunderland despite going on to win the Premier League match 2-0 at Goodison Park on Saturday.
Everton were dominant in the first period and deserved their 1-0 lead at the break, after Idrissa Gueye scored his first goal for the club with a well-taken finish.
But rock-bottom Sunderland were brighter after the interval and Koeman believes that was as much down to his side's play as it was the visitors' improvement.
Koeman also accepted that Everton got lucky when a late Jermain Defoe effort came back off the crossbar, just a few moments before Romelu Lukaku wrapped things up, in the process joining Duncan Ferguson on 60 goals as the club's joint top Premier League scorer.
"It's three points and another clean sheet," he told the BBC. "I was really pleased by the first 45 minutes, but not really happy about the second 45.
"I think we dropped the tempo in the second half, and played more backwards than forwards.
"We had one lucky moment, the shot of Defoe [which hit the bar]. There was a foul on Morgan Schneiderlin in the build-up, and the referee didn't whistle. But it was a lucky moment.
"We did it to ourselves because we dropped the tempo in the second half."
For David Moyes the match was a first return to Goodison since a 2-0 defeat in April 2014, a result which sealed his fate at Manchester United, and he acknowledged Sunderland's first-half performance could not have been much worse.
"I wanted to come here and frustrate them, and keep the crowd low-level. For long periods we did that," he told reporters.
"But we didn't ever do anything really well with the ball. I was glad it was 1-0 at half-time because the boy [Tom Davies] hit the post just before.
"We couldn't have played any worse than in the first half; I wanted them to be braver and I felt we did that [in the second half]."
