OWEN Coyle pleaded with Wanderers fans to keep the faith despite another demoralising day at the Reebok.

The Whites remain entrenched in the bottom three after Everton inflicted a 10th defeat of the season with second-half goals from Marouane Fellaini and Apostolos Vellios.

David Wheater didn’t help Coyle’s cause after being sent off for the second time in his last seven starts.

Referee Michael Oliver handed the defender a straight red card for a lunging challenge on Diniyar Bilyaletdinov just 19 minutes in – and he will now be suspended for the next four games.

Coyle had been without a raft of first team players and had Dedryck Boyata pull out of the squad on the day of the game. But the crestfallen boss insists both he and the players at his disposal are capable of pulling the club clear of danger.

“I’ve been there as a player and when you lose games it’s horrible,” he said. “As a manager you can magnify that by 100 times because it’s not a responsibility you shirk.

“I’m very proud to be the manager of a fantastic football club and you want to give back to the fans, want to make sure they’re smiling and if you lose games you’re hurting. But I also know how quickly football can change.

“We have missed two or three chances to move out of the bottom three, so the next game becomes bigger still. With that comes all the scrutiny and the opinions and I’ll take that on the chin.

“But if I felt for one single minute this was a team that had its best players available or was playing at his maximum and still couldn’t win games, then you’d think ‘hold on a minute’. But that’s not the case here.”

Although Wanderers were clearly up against it after Wheater’s early dismissal, Coyle felt disappointed his side had still not been able to grind out a result.

“I don’t want to stand here making excuses, and you can get results with 10 men,” he said.

“There were spells in the game where we carried a threat. We had to chase the game after going 1-0 down and went to two strikers and we caused them problems.

“But we have to defend better than we did and I felt both goals were avoidable. They were two great crosses but they had to be dealt with.”