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After four draws on the bounce, I need a win and I think I have a chance here. Hull are in a relegation battle, scrapping for points, but they’ve found a bit of form of late and they just knocked Mark Hughes’ Stoke out of the FA Cup. We’ve got Idrissa Gueye and Oumar Niasse back from the Afrcian Nations, but neither are in any fit state to play. But that’s not my biggest problem right now. I am not happy with the looks on the faces of Deulofeu and Lukaku…

Once again, it’s a match that we dominate. Once again, we have all the cutting edge of a strawberry sponge cake. Lukaku is visibly sulking. He’s slow to everything, he cracks off shots without thinking, he’s half the player he was two months ago. Deulofeu’s not quite as poor, but after 11 goals or assists in eight matches before December, he’s now offered just one assist in six. And we won’t get many more out of him because early in the first half he goes down clutching his calf, an injury that will see him out for two weeks. 

He leaves with the assistance of the physio, Lukaku leaves midway through the second half when I replace him with Enner Valencia, who at least has the good manners to snap into some tackles. Fifteen minutes before the end, he appears to have done more than that. He harries a defender, snatches possession and lofts a cross into the back post where James McClean heads home. But the referee rules the goal out for offside. It is not offside and I tell the reporters as much afterwards. It ends 0-0, our fifth consecutive draw in all competitions and our sixth in seven games. 

After the game, Deulofeu and Lukaku both come to me separately to complain that I have broken my promise to sell them. There seems to be no way to make them understand that I offered them both out to every club in the world, but no-one made a bid! I couldn’t have done anything else to shift them. Deulofeu confuses me by claiming that I’ve refused to offer him a new contract, so I offer him a new contract, but he says he wants £200,000 a week and that’s the end of that. I do check in with Bill, but he laughs, does some jazz hands and tells me I can go to £90,000 max.

Lukaku is just completely broken. His morale is rock bottom and I can’t play him in the first team. He’ll just start crying again. Enner Valencia, on loan from West Ham, is ineligible. This, quite frankly, is incredible news for Oumar Niasse. If only he wasn’t completely lacking in match fitness after sitting on the sidelines for the entire African Nations Cup…

We are rubbish and West Ham pull us all over the park. Leighton Baines is having a stinker, Andrea Poli isn’t really settling yet, James McClean is rubbish and then injures himself and at the top, Oumar Niasse lumbers around like someone’s dad playing five a side after six months on the sofa. We remain in the game purely because of the efforts of Alfie Areola and Domagoj Vida, titans the pair of them. 

And then the ball falls to Niasse about 40 yards out and, possibly to avoid having to run, he blats it at the goal and Adrian can only parry it. West Ham’s defenders are not alive to the danger, the ball rolls out to the penalty spot and Niasse surges forward and twats it into the top corner.

Something in West Ham seems to die at that point, as if they realise that they are in the presence of a galaxy class logic-breaker, a man quite obviously bad at football, but a man destined to shrug that off and score multiple crucial goals. A sort of super-Origi, if you will. Exhausted and broken by internal division, robbed of our two best players by injury and market forces, we stumble over the line for our first win in five games.

With Lukaku effectively out for the season with abysmal morale, Deulofeu genuinely injured and everyone else knackered, this is not the time for an FA Cup replay away at Bristol City. 

It is a remarkable performance. In that people will remark on the performance by saying, “What a bloody awful performance that was.”

There are no positives, save perhaps the knowledge that with City hitting the bar twice, it could actually have been much worse. We are just so ordinary. There’s no creativity, there’s no flair, there’s not even the basic level of drive, dedication and shithousery you’d expect from any Everton side. We just sort of mooch through the game and hope it all works out. It doesn’t work out and now we’re out of both cups. 

As our “You’re Out Of The FA Cup” week off approaches, we face a Southampton side that has rivalled us for the season’s ‘blimey, they’re doing all right this year, aren’t they?’ award.

The difference is that they kept hold of Virgil van Dijk and Dusan Tadic and they didn’t seem to fall out over it. Deulofeu is still injured. Malingering, I’d wager. I send Lukaku off to lead the line for the U23s in their friendly against Fleetwood. He misses a sitter after five minutes and looks “uninterested” throughout. 

We couldn’t ask for a better start. Or a more implausible one. McClean, who hasn’t offered up a single assist since November, lobs a cross to the back post and Niasse is there to nod home his eighth Premier League goal in eleven starts.

But moments later, Southampton fire in their own cross, Alfie Areola runs out, misses it completely and Shane Long equalises. After half an hour, a very similar goal. Steve Davis lofts the ball over our centre-backs, Areola runs out, Long heads it over him as he approaches. 

We’re better in the second half. Poli, left out so that I could deploy the most combative midfield available, comes on and impresses, creating a decent number of chances, but they’re all saved by the indomitable Fraser Forster. We probably deserve a win, we should definitely have a draw, but for the first time since early December, we lose. 

Now look, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Oh look, he’s screwed it up again. One minute he’s flying, next minute he’s on a streak of one win in eight games,” and that is technically true. But we’ve lost two of our three best players with the injury to Deulofeu and the massive sulk of Lukaku. We got stiffed in the transfer window and couldn’t buy anyone new, though in hindsight I might have been better off cancelling the purchase of Poli and pushing forward with the move for left winger Filip Kostic. And we’re FOURTH! We’re fourth with eleven games to go. If you’d have offered me that when we started, I’d have bitten your arm off. Or just politely accepted it and left you physically unscathed. But either way, this is fine. This is all fine. 

Oh God, it’s Liverpool next…

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