They say the road to hell is paved with online petitions.

Tuesday’s result should have come as no surprise. We don’t get many right here, but Brighton were simply all wrong for this Everton, and the freak result at the Birmo Arena at the weekend was going to have no bearing on it. It was never a ‘platform to build from’, whatever that really means.

Frank Lampard will get the sack now, it’s inevitable. Despite all the caveats, and there are plenty, he doesn’t have a leg to to stand on. It was always the case when he was appointed, that he just doesn’t have a ‘body of work’ to support the idea that having patience will see him turn this around. 

If you are making the decision here, you are surely at the point where you look at it and think that a new man simply could not do any worse, and he might do a bit better – enough to ensure Premier League survival. The stakes are so high, and your options are so limited, that you are going to control the one thing that you can.

It’s the same old scene.

Taxi for Frank. Steven Gerrard might even be driving.

Sean Dyche isn’t in work, so won’t cost so much to get on a short-term deal, and his appearance and demeanour fit the narrative of the intangibles now required – ‘toughness’ and ‘bollocks’ – so it would be surprising if he isn’t the Everton manager by the time we play Southampton next week. 

Yet another new dawn – blue flares on Goodison Road – lilac tie flapping in the breeze. We go again.

Modern football feels like the Old West, with ageing gunslingers like Everton coming to terms with the arrival of the railroads. Or in this case, well-funded, well-coached, promoted teams who have been building methodically with the sole aim of gaining then retaining Premier League status and the dough that comes with it. That combined with Financial Fair Play, a measure designed primarily to protect the interests of the top for or five clubs, has had an unforeseen side-effect of hamstringing the Blues and preventing them from bludgeoning their way to safety with more short-term spending. 

Again, it’s easy as a Monday morning CEO to say that we should have been set up like Brentford all along, but did we think that when Carlo Ancelotti, with all that Unstoppable Sex Machine Holdings money in his back sack, was signing James Rodriguez and little fat Allan?

This United game feels like an utter irrelevance then. And if Lampard is going to get sacked as expected, it feels like a shithouse trick to send him out to be humiliated – which is a distinct possibility in the face of a United side transformed by Erik Ten Hag’s strength of personality and hundreds of millions of pounds of new signings.

When Danny Ings, 

I hear violins.