Everyone must unite behind Frank Lampard - Everton's position is too perilous for anything else

If you can pardon the pun – as this really isn’t a laughing matter – it’s time to be Frank and for everyone at Everton to unite behind Lampard because the Blues are in a mess.

The past 127 days have brought just one Premier League victory for Everton and produced an alarming slide down the table to 16th place.

With their next fixture in the competition at St James’ Park on February 8, Everton know defeat to Newcastle United could see Eddie Howe’s side to within a point of them.

Put plainly, the Blues simply have to stop the rot and start getting points on the board again quickly because over the past four months it’s like they’ve forgotten how to win games.

Such was the malaise under Rafa Benitez that his former employment at Liverpool had become a scratch compared to the gaping wound that was Everton’s hapless form as they haemorrhaged league places.

Even when Farhad Moshiri made the most-controversial managerial appointment in the history of England’s most-passionate football city by drafting in the ex-Reds boss, even the staunchest anti-Benitez critic could have imagined that things would unravel so spectacularly and so quickly to create what has become a (totally avoidable) real-life football nightmare.

Mr Moshiri got it wrong with his recruitment of the 61-year-old Spaniard last summer, badly wrong, and now his club and all their loyal but long-suffering supporters are paying the price.

Given that, and the on-field crisis Everton face as they look nervously over their shoulders, haunted by the prospect of a first relegation for 71 years, it’s been imperative that this time club chiefs chose a manager that a browbeaten fanbase – and players – could get behind.

Regardless of who you wanted to see next in the