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!