It was a huge privilege to play in my first Merseyside derby and to experience that unbelievable atmosphere. It was Goodison at its absolute best.

As a local lad, I know full well what this game means to Evertonians and I’m proud that, as a team, we can say we gave absolutely everything and put in a top-drawer performance against a world-class team.

We’ve gone toe-to-toe with them and probably should have won the game.

The match itself was end-to-end, exciting, tough, electric – many things you feel a Merseyside derby should be. It was a game full of chances and a fantastic game of football. I thought we were outstanding and, as a team, we stuck together and gave everything for 95 minutes.

I’m devastated about my goal being ruled out for offside because I thought that’s what we deserved. We were fantastic. We nullified them – they are going to have chances, of course – but we have a world-class goalkeeper and we did well as a defensive unit, too.

It’s horrible when you score a goal and it’s ruled out later, I’m not going to lie. But you have to take it on the chin and we made sure we didn’t drop too much from that and allow them to score a winner.

Jordan has to take a lot of credit for that. He was immense. He’s such an important character for Everton. You’ve seen that over the years and he’s a massive factor in how we want to improve.

When you’ve got a world-class goalkeeper behind you who can make saves, dictate the game with his feet, it makes such a difference. He’s an incredible character.

We created a lot of chances against a top team and we’ll go again. I think everyone can see now we’re improving, we’re listening to the manager, we’ve signed some fantastic characters in the past couple of days in Gana and Jimmy [Garner] and we need to keep on improving, it’s as simple as that.

We’ve given absolutely everything these past few weeks and the win will come. We are getting stronger as a team, as a football club, and we’ll keep on working.

Everyone who understands football can see that we’re moving in the right direction. It’s the Premier League, it’s hard to win football games. You’ve got to graft and graft and graft to win matches and we are doing that.

We’ve deserved to win games and we haven’t, so we need to put that right but people watching us can see the Football Club is coming together: the supporters, players and staff and we are working on that every single day.

We’ve got a fantastic team full of fantastic characters and we’ll keep on going because we all want success for Everton. Everyone can see what we are trying to do and it will come.

Thank you for your fantastic support before, during and after Saturday’s game. We know you’re behind us and, together, we’ll drive this football club forward.

UTT.