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Finch Farm was leaking like a sieve and Sam Allardyce was furious.

The manager’s team selections were becoming common knowledge before he wanted and the problem showed no sign of slowing down.

Big Sam wasn’t happy, he felt undermined and was determined to find the source of the information.

He flirted with the idea of going to the press with the problem and making it public, such was his annoyance, but decided against doing so, aware of the splash it would create even though he saw value in setting the hares running.

Eventually, he managed to fix the leak and his selections remained under wraps but it was a sign, less than three months into his reign, that this marriage of convenience, between he and Everton, would struggle to last.

It ended bitterly, in fact, as an acrimonious divorce played out amid expletive-laced anger from the fans and with a parting shot from the man himself on the eve of his sacking.

(Image: Peter Byrne/PA Wire)

Allardyce was in Dubai when Everton came calling, cap in hand, in the wake of the disturbing defeat at Southampton and by the time you read this he could well be back there, confirming he was due to jet off on holiday after Wednesday morning’s (short by the sounds of it) meeting with Farhad Moshiri.

But while in late November he flew back to England as a manager in demand he leaves these shores as someone whose services are no longer required.

Allardyce did the job he was asked to do by Everton but was not wanted for the one he believed he was capable of doing.

That will be the responsibility of a new head coach, in a new era already marked by sweeping change, but whoever replaces him will do well to pack in as much as the 63-year-old did in the space of six months at Goodison.

Big Sam was never a £6m a year manager but he had the Blues over a barrel when they refused to take no for an answer after he’d initially turned them down.

(Image: Tony McArdle/Everton FC via Getty Images)

All of a sudden, in the club’s hour of need, he could demand exactly what they had paid the previous manager as well insist on an 18 month contract the powers had been reluctant to give.

He had been enjoying his retirement and had taken in the Formula One the day earlier with a few drinks when he received the call from his agent saying Everton really wanted him this time.

Despite his attempts at re-writing history, Allardyce began as Everton manager against Huddersfield and proceeded to oversee a seven match unbeaten run in all competitions, including a point at Anfield in the most Big Sam way possible, that took Everton to ninth.

Publicly he said he’d moved beyond the old rivalries that were a sub-plot to his days at Bolton but privately he was buzzing about taking a point off Liverpool.

But the honeymoon, if ever there was one of a man as unpopular from the off as Allardyce, would soon be over Everton lost four on the spin and were then lucky to draw at home to West Brom.

Wins over Leicester and Crystal Palace provided welcome but sporadic relief but the manner of defeats to Arsenal and Watford were damaging and after a start which will have quietened down his many detractors, the thread was beginning to fray on his club suit.

Allardyce was relaxed, an old hand, in front of the media but when asked about style he was guaranteed to lose his cool yet the questions, however much they have stalked his career, were relevant once again as his brief at Everton changed.

He now had to show he was more than just a firefighter if he had any hope of keeping his job beyond the end of the season.

A warm weather training camp in Dubai was sandwiched in between the win over Palace and the defeat to Watford and though it was seen as a useful exercise, rumours circled of heated training ground exchanges with certain players in the baking Middle East sun.

The cracks between Allardyce and the supporters widened, and in public, at Turf Moor in March yet he insisted to the ECHO that the sceptics were only in the minority.

And so certain (mistakenly, of course) was he of the fact that he labelled our question as “poor” and asked for more “positive” ones.

The following two months would show Big Sam that the question was in fact pertinent, not poor, and that the minority was only getting louder and louder by the weeks.

It was a soundtrack to the end of the season that Everton could not ignore although his position was far from determined until the campaign was closing in with Allardyce retaining support at the top of the club for long spells his January signings Cenk Tosun and Theo Walcott began to make an impact.

But Big Sam knew the writing was on the wall when summoned, with Steve Walsh, for a sit down with Moshiri in late April.

Though, unconvincingly for many supporters, he told the cameras the meeting was positive and that he now had the clarity he called for, the reality is he was offered no assurances beyond the end of the season.

Allardyce had asked Moshiri, the chairman Bill Kenwright and out-going chief executive Robert Elstone to issue a statement backing him, but nobody was willing to grant him his request.

And so Big Sam left Goodison as he arrived: as a lonely figure, with skin “like a rhino” still intact, no doubt convinced he had been wronged by another club - and with a holiday on his mind.