He only writes when they’re winning.

Too frigging right. Who can be arsed talking about us when we look shite such as at St. James Park the other night when a goal from Danny De Vito in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was enough to condemn the Toffees to their third defeat in a row.

They were all hard, tight games. And no one soiled their bed linen over them, because Evertonians have now become the louche, laidback, chilled out entertainers of the Premier League. After all, we’re a pretty much a civil engineering project with a football team attached to it. 

‘Fuck Mina’s hamstring, how are the roof trusses looking.’

To the drone!

Everyone can see the transformation in the team as well. The watershed came against these same opponents – not in that game at the end of the season, but the battering in the FA Cup when Frank Lampard said the team lacked bollocks. From that point the job at hand became pretty clear. First and foremost we needed an upgrade in attitude, and this summer saw transfer business with that objective front and centre. Conor Coady and James Tarkowski have had the biggest impact in that regard, but even Neal Maupay, for instance, seems a little nark. 

No fannies. No dickheads.

The other players have clearly been given a lift by this. Just look at how Vitalii Mykolenko throws himself in front of shots like his life depends on it. There’s a benchmark when it comes to workrate now, and it looks like no one wants to be the one held responsible for letting those standards slip.

You can have as many inverted false nines breaking the expected press between the lines as you want; what’s never changed in football is what Joe Royle used to say: it’s just about good players working hard.

Against the better teams it’s obvious that we still need more attacking options. At Newcastle, with Demarai Gray and Anthony Gordon struggling to make an impact we created virtually nothing. But Lampard clearly knows that, and you would expect strengthening in those forward areas to be a priority when the transfer window opens. 

Everyone expected Palace to pose more of a challenge than this, as they have some really good players and loads of pace on the break. However, the energy Everton showed from the first whistle just underlined how far they’ve come since that embarrassment at Selhurst Park in March.

Alex Iwobi has perhaps been transformed more than any other individual in that time. Once the poster-boy for the schizophrenic recruitment policies that have rinsed Farhad Moshiri down to his last yacht, the three-lunged schemer is now the epitome of the all-action style Lampard is trying to impose on this team. Indeed, it was Iwobi’s pass into the feet of Dominic Calvert-Lewin on 11 minutes that allowed the striker to spin past Marc Guehi, who looked like he walked into a patio door, before driving a low shot into the corner of the Gwladys Street net. 

All three goals were great. The second, just after the hour, started with what looked like it was becoming a proper ‘John Stones moment’ with the ball being passed around the Everton box following a goal kick. But the players kept their cool, worked the ball out to Seamus Coleman and then a combination of Calvert-Lewin and Iwobi found the steadily improving Amadou Onana. The behemoth Belgian picked out the run of Mykolenko whose low shot was saved at full stretch, only for Gordon, resplendent with his Myra Hindley haircut, to tap home the rebound. The fella out of Peters and Lee could see that he was about two furlongs onside, but still it required the Saints of Stockley Park to overturn the linesman’s flag. 

The third though might have been the Creme de la Menthe of the lot, as substitute Dwight McNeil’s weaving run into the box again saw Iwobi involved. This time the big knight-out-of-the-the-chess-set-headed midfielder kidded the bollocks off the keeper, back-heeling a return to Simpsons character McNeil to bury from close range.

The only thing remaining was some fuming Crystal Palace supporter leaving the ground muttering ‘Woooh! That song is so facking childish.’