Everton five-game relegation escape left Frank Lampard hit for six

Five games is still enough to save a Premier League season as Kevin Campbell demonstrated with his incredible nine-goal blast over such a period for Everton in 1999. Some 23 years ago today the striker completed that spree with a hat-trick in a 6-0 thrashing of West Ham United at Goodison Park that secured the Blues’ top-flight status that had been looking decided shaky a month earlier.

It was a damning indictment of what had gone before his arrival that Campbell, who didn’t find the net until April 11, would finish Everton’s top scorer in the 1998/99 season but his goals almost single-handedly saved the club from relegation. The Blues had struggled to score for most of the campaign – infamously netting just three times in their first 12 Premier League home games and drawing nine blanks in the process – before their 5-0 win over Middlesbrough on February 17.

For most of Walter Smith’s first season, Everton had been teetering just above the drop zone but a four-game losing streak in the spring saw them plummet into the bottom three on Easter Monday. Back to back defeats to Arsenal (2-0, home) and Manchester United (3-1, away) prompted Smith to try and bolster his numbers with a couple of fresh faces for the run-in.

He snapped up midfielder Scot Gemmill from Nottingham Forest plus another former City Ground old boy, who had departed the East Midlands the previous summer for a stint in Turkey. Campbell, who initially arrived on loan, was looking for a way out of Trabzonspor following the furore after the club’s president branded him a “cannibal” and would prove to be the Blues saviour.

It was an inauspicious start for the pair, though, as they suffered a 3-2 defeat to Liverpool on their respective debuts despite Olivier