But Everton’s season is getting worse by the game – this was their fourth successive league defeat and they are now fourth from bottom ahead of Saturday’s clash at Sunderland.

Boss Moyes said: “In the end the two boys were stupid and I have told them so.

“They were both on a booking and they should have known better. Now they will both miss matches when we least can afford that.

“They wanted to show they cared, and I would rather have them that way than not.

“But they let their team-mates down – even if they were trying to do the best they could.”

Moyes witnessed a battling display from a side who have been on the wrong end of a succession of thrashings.

And he even felt harshly treated by referee Graham Poll, who disallowed a first half ’goal’ from James Beattie after the cross leading up to the strike was ruled out of play.

Moyes said: “I don’t want to moan about refereeing decisions, but the ball was in play when Tim Cahill crossed it, I’m sure of that.

“Whether it would have made a difference to the result I don’t know, but it would have made it 2-1 to them and then we scored again soon after – so we should have been level at the break.”

The Scot praised the effort of his players, continuing: “They worked really hard, you can’t keep whipping them, you have to say they did well and that they must keep going.”

And he insisted he will continue to lead from the front as storm clouds gather over his Goodison regime.

He added: “I will be on the touchline urging them on in the next match, I have to stand up to be counted just like them.

“We are all in this together.”

For Liverpool boss Rafael Benitez it was a ninth straight league win and the European champions are closing in on United, who could only draw at Birmingham.

He said: ”All the team worked really hard, Mohamed Sissoko, Xabi Alonso, Peter Crouch – everyone in every department.

“The team now have more confidence, we have very good players who are able to produce a different approach to different games.

“We knew it would be a physical game with a high tempo, but we controlled the game.

“The big difference between this season and last is that we now have players like Sissoko and Crouch who are different players more suited to this sort of situation, certainly in more physical games like this.

“We are not thinking of other teams, just the next three points and then we will see after the holiday time where we are.

“But we did not really play at our best level, we can do better because there were times we did not win possession enough and allowed them to get the ball into our box.

“For 20 minutes in the second half we were losing the ball in the air and created problems for ourselves.

“We have played better games with more control, but obviously I am happy with a derby win, it is different to last season when we lost at Everton.”