Liverpool 1 Everton 1

Veni, vidi, trahere.

Sam Allardyce’s first Merseyside derby ended in a 1-1 draw, thanks to a late penalty from Wayne Rooney that almost caused Jurgen Klopp to spit out his new teeth and rip the This is Anfield doormat off his frazzled bonce.

There were raised eyebrows when Marbella’s finest decreed that Everton would play four-four-fucking-two, and but for the hubris of his opposite number – who saw fit to leave Philippe Coutinho, Roberto Firmino, Emre Can and Georginio Wijnaldum on the bench ahead of a visit from West Brom on Wednesday – a ragtag band of defenders, thrown together through a combination of injury and appalling recruitment, could well have been served a hiding of Roberto Martinez proportions. Fortunately, though, the tricky Reds had decidedly bigger fish to fry, and so a backline comprised of Jonjoe Kenny, Ashley Williams, Mason Holgate and Cuco Martina was enough to restrict the scoreline to a point where the Blues were only a moment of fortune or quality away from being right back in the match.

A midfield four of Rooney, Tom Davies, Idrissa Gana Gueye and Gylfi Sigurdsson were predictably overran from the get-go, leaving Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Oumar Niasse to feed off scraps up front. According to those nerds at Opta, Everton had a lower share of the ball (21%) than they'd managed in any other Premier League game since records began in 2003/04 – suggesting that rather than bleat about penalties that even Mark Clattenburg would struggle to wave away, Klopp and his minions would be better served asking why they weren’t out of sight after an opening 45 minutes which saw Big Sam’s merry mob give a performance befitting a League Two team hoping to steal an FA Cup replay (more on that in January).

With little to suggest that the defensive personnel had, as Mick Foley would say, the intestinal fortitude to withstand a prolonged siege, there was more than a touch of the inevitable about Mohamed Salah’s quite sublime strike on 42 minutes. The Egyptian broke the deadlock – and, we all assumed, the floodgates – as he took the ball down under what first appeared to be pressure from Martina, only for it to transpire that Ronald Koeman had detonated his compatriot’s internal explosives, causing him to collapse in on himself like Tower 7. Salah then somehow managed to momentarily freeze Gana in time, before curling a peach of a shot around Williams and well beyond the reach of Jordan Pickford. The game should have been dead and buried minutes later when Sadio Mane found himself with a clear run on goal and both Dominic Solanke and Salah free to tap into a virtually empty net, but the Senegalese forward, who scored in both meetings last season, contrived to screw and awful shot past the far post.

Liverpool continued to dominate possession in the second half, but as time wore on, Everton started to look more comfortable in what was an unashamedly ultra-defensive shape, to the point where you felt that they were now confident in their ability to repel attacks from their base on the 18-yard line. Were it any other team in any other game, you would have suspected that the hosts could end up ruing the chances they had spurned earlier on; especially when Klopp doubled down on his contemptuous approach by withdrawing top-scorer Salah in the 67^th minute, despite his team’s narrow advantage, and the fact that they were being largely restricted to half-chances and efforts from outside the box. As it happened, not even an excruciatingly poor record on this ground was enough to stop that familiar pattern from playing out in Everton’s favour.

The plaudits will rightly go to the defence, with Kenny in particular giving a fantastic performance, but it was a rare moment of quality that truly earned the point. Rooney, who was much more useful following half-time changes that allowed him to move inside, gathered the ball out on the right-wing, near the halfway line, and picked out Calvert-Lewin with a perfectly-weighted, raking pass that dropped just over the head of the last defender, Dejan Lovren. The young striker showed tremendous skill and composure to watch the ball onto his thigh, and then move in behind the Croatian lump, who took it upon himself to shove his opponent with the impudence of someone facing a team that has been awarded but a single penalty at Anfield since the fall of well-known red Adolf Hitler.

Unfortunately for Lovren (and Hitler’s ghost), big Craig Pawson was there to chew bubblegum and give stonewall penalties – and he was all out of bubblegum. The whistle was blown, and in the absence of Leighton Baines it was Rooney who took responsibility and smashed his spot kick hard and high up the middle. Klopp responded by finally sending on Coutinho, but it proved to be too little, too late, as a rear-guard boosted by the addition of Phil Jagielka managed to hold out for an extremely unexpected point. It was initially insulting when the Sky commentator claimed that a draw would represent bragging rights for little Everton, but then it turned out that he was correct, as the freezing Toffees were warmed by the greatest prize of all: Klopp having another one of his Basil Fawlty meltdowns after someone didn’t let him win.

What a tit.

Welcome to the Big Sam Penitentiary

He’s here.

It’s said that a week is a long time in football, but perhaps not long enough for Evertonians to complete all five stages of grief following the appointment of one of the game’s longest-running memes as manager.

In fairness to le Grand Samuel, his arrival appears to have been the catalyst for a marked improvement in a team that was sleepwalking towards a relegation battle before picking up six points in the space of a week. Those back to back wins, which saw the Blues leapfrog their recent molesters Southampton into 10th place, have led some to question the necessity of caving into the demands of a manager whose record hardly befits the exorbitant wages and brown envelope bonuses that Farhad Moshiri has agreed to part with; and yet despite the obvious merits to these arguments, there’s no getting away from the fact that the search for Ronald Koeman’s replacement had become nothing short of an embarrassment, or that the longer it was allowed to rumble on, the more brazen this toxic set of players would have been in their resolve to down tools on hapless caretaker manager, David Unsworth.

After seeing his once-burgeoning reputation take something of a hit during the course of his spell in temporary charge, it was nice that poor old Coach Rhinoceros was able to sign off with an emphatic four-nil victory over a pitiful West Ham United. The game will forever be remembered as Wayne Rooney’s very own Gazza vs. Leyton Orient, as the de facto captain scored his first hat-trick since the Bootle brass houses stopped doing Black Friday - a treble which included a Goal of the Season candidate from inside his own half, following a piece of trademark idiocy from Joe Hart. It was a far from perfect performance, with the Hammers pinning Everton back for long periods of the second half and going so close as to miss a penalty, awarded after Ashley Williams - whose by any means necessary approach to conceding goals has earned him the nickname Malcolm Why? - made an even dafter attempt at winning the ball than the one he came up with against Atalanta.

The mini-revival continued three days later, when Jurgen Klopp’s somehow even weirder mate, David Wagner, brought his promoted Huddersfield Town to Fortress Woodison. Rooney was again deployed in a deeper midfield role alongside Idrissa Gana Gueye and Tom Davies, with Aaron Lennon, Gylfi Sigurdsson and Dominic Calvert-Lewin making up a much more balanced front three than what we’ve become accustomed to seeing. While I can’t say that I’m convinced that the Rooney experiment won’t come a cropper against better sides who will push the tempo and have runners swarming all over him, it certainly made a difference having someone who is willing to put his foot on the ball and pick the kind of incisive passes that have enabled Lennon to become more of a potent weapon than he has been since his initial loan spell in 2015. Sigurdsson is another who has looked far better with Rooney in behind him, making it all the more interesting to see how this new system fares against Liverpool’s famous gegenfoul on Sunday.

While it’s obviously too early to start talking about anything beyond increasing the breathing space between themselves and the teams that look ready to be cut adrift down at the bottom, there does at last seem to be cause for cautious optimism within the club. Calvert-Lewin showed again against Huddersfield that he’s already good enough to provide cover for whoever ends up being Allardyce’s choice to lead the line on a more regular basis, and regardless of the fact that they both came against limited opposition, keeping consecutive clean sheets with a defence featuring Cuco Martina at left-back is certainly no mean feat. There are, quite understandably, plenty of misgivings over developments such as Anfield gremlin Sammy Lee - who at least had the decency not to turn up in the My Cousin Vinny suit that he wore while prowling the touchline at Bolton - and Craig ‘et tu?’ Shakespeare rocking up with Old Fat ‘Ead, but those will quickly be forgotten if results continue to improve.

Being the pragmatist that he is, you would think that Allardyce will be happy to just get out of dodge without being humiliated when he takes charge of his first Merseyside derby at the weekend. The tricky Reds are likely to be flying after securing their place in the Champions League knockout rounds thanks to a seven-nil mauling of Spartak Moscow, and to be honest, the thought of Mohamed Salah or Saido Mane running at a wrong-footed Martina doesn’t exactly fill one with confidence. Hopefully, after seeing them wallop Brighton and now Spartak, and letting their fans fill their boots with quips about the new Everton manager’s rare blood type OXO, Satan will have exhausted his powers for the week, and the match will be something of a fair contest.

Ha!