Matchday Seven · Chelsea (h) · L 0–2 · 17 October 2026

Neto scores 44 seconds into second half and in 90th minute to end Everton's unbeaten run

For forty-five minutes Everton were the better side, but they had six shots all afternoon, two of them after the break.

Unashamedly written by a machine · The suffering is real

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Everton lost for the first time this season to a goal forty-four seconds after half-time and another in the ninetieth minute, both of them Pedro Neto's. The first came when Maitland-Niles could not stop Hato reaching the byline and the cutback took a touch off Tarkowski to Neto, unmarked at the back post, and Pickford got a hand to the shot without keeping it out. Everton had been the better side until then, but the one big chance they made had already been headed by Barry from six yards straight into Martínez's arms, and the best of them was over by the half-hour. The second, rolled in from a free kick Nørgaard gave away on his debut, sent the supporters home having worked out that Everton have won two of their last fourteen league games.

The Week Before

The preview carried the week, and the morning gave it two answers and a question. Mykolenko was back, which Moyes had said on Friday was a chance, and Branthwaite had passed the late check on the problem he picked up early at Hull and went to the middle of the defence, where the fortnight's argument had always wanted him. The question was Michael Keane, who played the whole of last Sunday and was not in the squad at all, and no page read before or after the game said why; the Echo's press-conference blog on Friday had counted the squad fully fit barring Mykolenko. The right wing went to Merlin Röhl, a midfielder with a photo book out this week, ahead of Johnson, George and Dibling, and the BBC's reporter in the ground read it as Moyes setting up to counter Chelsea's shape. TPF read it with its first smile in a while. "A full squad," wrote one member at a quarter to twelve; "Strongest bench for years," wrote another three minutes later, and a third put it best: having options is a wonderful new feeling. The one question on the board was why not Dibling, and the member who answered it had worked out that Röhl could tuck in and make a five and track their wing-back, which is exactly what the manager had in mind and roughly what happened for forty-five minutes.

Chelsea made one change from the side that put five past Bournemouth: Hato for Pep Chavarría, who, Xabi Alonso said afterwards, felt something in his last action in training on Friday. Malo Gusto was ill and stayed in London. Alonso's slip on Friday, calling the ground Goodison and correcting himself, survived into Saturday: the BBC's live page opened its Premier League day "at Goodison Park", spent the next quarter of an hour telling readers it knew, and was still telling them at kick-off. Jordan Henderson, back in the city where he spent twelve years across the park, was booed as his name was read out on the tannoy, and football.london reckoned the crowd booed his every touch afterwards, which he is said to have relished.

Getting there was the week's other story and it ended as the club had warned. Great Howard Street was closed northbound from Thursday evening for an emergency cable repair, Merseyrail ran replacement buses between Hunts Cross and Moorfields for its tunnel works, Boundary Street was made one-way towards the ground from nine until kick-off, and the club asked everyone to come early and, if they could, from the north. The London Blues had their own engineering: one TPF member, posting at seven minutes to eleven, had come via Crewe with the Chelsea support and found a four-carriage train to Lime Street that plenty could not get on, and was told by the next reply that he should have set off earlier. The sky at half past twelve was mainly clear and about ten degrees, with four miles an hour of wind; by two o'clock it was eleven degrees and partly cloudy, and one supporter on Bluesky in the South Stand could not see the tackle on Garner for the sun. The BBC called it chilly but sunny, with the areas around the ground busy early. There were 52,271 inside, and an hour before kick-off Farhad Moshiri walked through the media room, which the Echo noticed. The owners who bought the club from him did not attend.

The Match: Everton 0–2 Chelsea

It started slowly, as half past twelve kick-offs do, and the BBC's reporter in the ground blamed the hour and Röhl's selection in the same sentence, so that for once television got the blame for something before the referee did. Grealish and Caicedo had words over a throw-in in the sixth minute and Pickford came out to calm it, which tells you what sort of afternoon it was going to be. Everton got through the first five minutes without conceding, and against a side that had scored five goals inside the first five minutes of its league games this season the BBC's live page logged that as an event. Palmer burst into the box in the eighth minute and was cut off, Tierney had a word with Colwill about the time he was taking over a throw, and in the fifteenth minute Palmer hit a low, hard shot that Pickford pushed away to his left. Henderson had a shot blocked in the twenty-second minute. On TPF the first verdict on the referee arrived at sixteen minutes to one, before he had done anything: he wanted to be seen.

Then Armstrong tackled Acheampong, won the ball, and was booked for the pace at which he did it, and the afternoon woke up. The BBC's writer called it the biggest cheer of the day and said the booking had only energised a crowd that had been quiet until then, and the Echo's blog heard the ground cheer the challenge before the card. Four minutes later Röhl, the wide midfielder, shot from just inside the box, Martínez held it, held it a little longer, and Tierney gave Everton a corner for the delay, which Neto protested his way into the book over. The referee, the BBC noted, was clearly not messing around. On TPF one member conceded at ten past one that Armstrong's was a deserved yellow, and was in a minority of one.

The chance Everton had came from that corner. Grealish delivered it, Barry was free in the six-yard box, and he headed it straight into Martínez's arms. The Guardian called it the one big chance Everton had all afternoon, and another big miss from Barry one of the afternoon's recurring themes; the Echo's Connor O'Neill called it "the sort of chance he had to take". The BBC's live page observed that Chelsea would have had something to say had a corner given for holding the ball produced a goal, which was true and did not come up. A minute later Everton took a free kick short, worked it into the box, and Grealish met the dropping ball on the volley and smashed it into the ground, so that it climbed and needed Martínez's fingertips to tip it over. The Echo's blog credited Dewsbury-Hall, at full stretch, with the cross that set it up. That was the best of Everton, and it had come and gone by the half-hour. TPF's reaction to the header was a thread on Barry's diabolical heading and, twenty-eight minutes later, a proposal to get Duncan Ferguson in to coach it, which drew a reply nominating Tim Cahill and another observing that Barry wins headers and cannot direct them, which is the kinder reading and probably the right one.

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The next ten minutes were needle. Acheampong was booked for tripping Grealish in the thirty-second; João Pedro went down under Tarkowski and wanted something; in the thirty-fourth Tarkowski shoved Caicedo off the ball, Rogers shoved Tarkowski, Henderson joined in on his captain's behalf, and Tarkowski and Rogers were both booked, the BBC's replays showing that Everton's captain had started it. Barry picked the ball up in the middle of the box in the thirty-seventh minute, took two touches too many, and poked a tame shot at Martínez, and in the sixty-third minute it was still the last shot Everton had had. Then Henderson took a corner and Caicedo pulled off to the back post, as the training ground had told him to, and volleyed it so hard that Pickford could only paw at it as it hit the angle of post and bar; the Guardian had the crossbar shaking for several seconds afterwards. It was the best strike of the day and the ground knew it.

The flashpoint came in the forty-second minute. Garner and Rogers went for the same ball, Rogers left the ground and his studs caught the inside of Garner's knee, and both came off badly. Tierney saw nothing in it; Tarkowski, standing over the referee, reminded him that Rogers was already booked; the VAR, Nicholas Hopton, checked and upheld the decision, and Garner went off for treatment and stood appealing to the fourth official while he waited to come back on. The ground chanted "off, off, off", and at the break, which came after Neto had tested Pickford's fingertips from distance and Armstrong had cleared Lacroix's header off the line from the last corner of the half, the ground booed, which the BBC presumed was for the officials. Moyes's view, that Armstrong's tackle was half-decent and Rogers's might have been a second yellow, was the ground's view with a Glaswegian accent. The BBC's half-time pundit said Armstrong's tackle had woken everyone up, that Everton had kept Chelsea to a couple of long-range efforts, and that the referee had got the big decisions right, which was two out of three. TPF, at twenty-three minutes past one, had proper enjoyed that: "Going toe to toe with one of the glamour boys … more of this please", and a minute later, "This is a real fight". It was 0–0, and Everton had been the better side without troubling anyone much.

Chelsea scored forty-four seconds after the restart, and the move was Everton's as much as theirs. There were no changes at half-time. Rogers took a goal kick with Maitland-Niles on his back, held him off, carried the ball and released Hato down the Chelsea left; Hato got to the byline, as the Echo put it, because the right-back failed to stop the cross, and cut the ball back. It took a touch off Tarkowski on the way, and Neto, unmarked at the back post, swept it left-footed and low to Pickford's left, where Pickford got a hand to it and did not keep it out. Sky said he should have done better; the Guardian called his attempt weak; the Echo, which has been asking questions about the goalkeeper for a fortnight, asked them again. It was the third goal Everton have conceded within three minutes of a second-half restart this season, after Mbeumo's in the forty-sixth minute in September and Gelhardt's in the forty-eighth last Sunday, which is a habit now and was described as one on Bluesky before the replays had finished. TPF's first thread, at 13:37, said it was like the Martínez days, the start of the second half again, and its second, in the same minute, gave its verdict on the right-back in two words, one of them printable. The Echo's blog, twenty minutes later, found the atmosphere inside the ground very flat.

Moyes did not wait for the hour. In the fifty-fifth minute Tyrique George came on for Maitland-Niles, against the club that sold him in the summer and had had him on the bench, an unused substitute in Chelsea's 6–0 home Premier League victory over Everton on 15 April 2024, so he had seen this fixture from the other end and knew how it could go. Röhl made a big block on Rogers a minute later. Palmer, from Rogers's through ball, lobbed Pickford cleverly and landed it on the roof of the net; then he and Rogers both shot from range. By the sixty-third minute Chelsea had taken the last eight shots in the game. Everton's possession, when they had it, went sideways along the back line, and the BBC heard the frustration; Caicedo pulled Armstrong down for a free kick in the sixty-fifth and Palmer, getting in the referee's ear about it, became the sixth man booked. Grealish was moved to the right and George to the left, and nothing much changed.

Then the afternoon stopped. Dewsbury-Hall put a free kick into the box in the sixty-sixth minute and Branthwaite and Martínez went for it together, head to head. Branthwaite sat up and was taken through the concussion checks and played on; Martínez stayed down, and the physios were waved on at once. He was treated for about ten minutes, by the Echo's count and the BBC's, and carried off in a neck brace and taken straight to hospital for what Alonso later called precautionary tests, having, Alonso said, left the stadium conscious. Pickford walked the length of the pitch to stand with him. Owen Hargreaves, on TNT, called it almost an NFL collision, two players so committed and so vulnerable. What the ground did during those ten minutes was argued over for the rest of the day. The Chelsea end sang "sign on" and a song about paying benefits while their goalkeeper lay on the ground, which the Echo's blog recorded and the Evertonians on Bluesky recorded with some heat; when the stretcher finally went, the Echo heard home supporters applaud him off and the Guardian heard Evertonian boos, and the supporters themselves spent the evening on TPF settling it: the North Stand clapped, the South Stand booed, and most of the boos were for the singing opposite. Mike Penders came on in the seventy-fifth minute, aged twenty-one, for a Premier League debut, Chelsea's youngest-ever Premier League goalkeeper, and the Echo's Chris Beesley drew the line from him to Liverpool's third-choice goalkeeper in the derby at the same end last season: Everton failed to test him too. Rogers went down in the box in the eightieth minute and Henderson wanted a penalty; he had backed into Tarkowski. Palmer tried the spectacular in the eighty-second and it flew behind.

In the eighty-fifth minute Moyes made the changes the board had been asking for since the hour, and not the ones it had asked for. Nørgaard came on for Armstrong, whom the Echo's ratings said should never have been taken off when he was, and Johnson for Grealish. Hackney and Dibling stayed where they were. Nørgaard's first involvement, by the BBC's account, was to be picked off by Palmer in the middle of the pitch, which started a three-on-one break that Pickford ended by saving from João Pedro at close range, Palmer having chosen the wrong pass. His second was the foul on Palmer that put him in the book in the eighty-ninth minute, and his third was to watch what followed. Henderson and Palmer stood over the free kick for long enough to annoy the home end, Henderson hit it into the wall, it struck Barry on the head, came off George and then off Mykolenko, who could not stretch to block it and got it stuck under his feet, and Neto, arriving where nobody in blue was, rolled it into the bottom corner in the ninetieth minute. Alonso had not made a change of his own choosing until then, and explained afterwards that with eleven minutes of added time it was really the seventy-ninth, which is a reading of the clock that supporters leaving to catch a replacement bus will have found unhelpful. Chelsea then made three changes at once. Dewsbury-Hall curled a ball across the box in the fourth added minute and Johnson, at the back post, was a stud away from a tap-in. Neto came off in the hundred-and-second minute, for what the BBC's writer thought would surely be a matter of seconds, having by the Standard's account already signed autographs in the crowd before the whistle; Palmer slid in on Branthwaite in the twelfth added minute and, on a booking, got no second card, which the BBC wondered about too. By then, in the tenth of the eleven added minutes, the BBC had watched a lot of Everton supporters decide they had seen enough and go to beat the traffic, which, with Great Howard Street shut, was less a verdict on the football than a reading of the map.

Everton were the better side for forty-five minutes and had six shots in the whole game, two of them after the break. Chelsea had eighteen, hit the bar, and needed two. The difference was the two moments Everton gave away and the one Barry gave back, and that was the match.

Post-Match

Moyes went to the cards first, and the Echo's Beesley took it down. "If our football in this country is not going to allow them then I don't know. We've got referees who we want to be the best in Europe, or think they're the best, because they let things go. I thought it looked a half-decent tackle. Maybe somebody might tell me I'm wrong or tell me differently, but I wasn't sure that it was the right decision." And on the one that did not come: "I was disappointed with the decision at the time. I had a wee look at the Morgan Rogers tackle on Jimmy, which, maybe some might have said something different, and I think that might have made a second yellow, it wasn't the case."

On the game he was fair and not generous. "Well, we weren't at our best for most of the game but I didn't think there was a huge amount between the teams at periods. They had more because of their quality and the levels they've got. But when I look back at the goals, the first one I was really disappointed with but it takes a deflection and sort of rolls into Neto. We had sort of covered the cutback, even though we didn't defend well. Then obviously the free-kick bounces down and settles for Chelsea as well. So, I think the run of the ball went in Chelsea's favour when it was most required." Asked the plain question: "Were they better than us? Yeah, I think so, but I didn't think they were hugely better for certain periods of game." To the Guardian: "It wasn't that we played that badly overall. We just didn't create enough which meant if we did anything wrong defensively it would count against us." On the debutant he had warned on Friday still had a wee bit to go: "I think everybody will probably have seen that today and we know that but we're trying to get him back. We're trying to get them some minutes into him." Nobody who played for Everton was quoted anywhere by Saturday evening, which after a first defeat is its own kind of statement.

Alonso was as happy as a man whose goalkeeper had gone to hospital could be. "Very happy with the result and the performance," he told TNT, as Sky carried it. "We needed one of these away wins where we have played very professional and serious, looking solid." And: "We need to keep working. It is just one game. If it is just one clean sheet, it will be very poor. We need many more." In the press conference, as football.london transcribed every word, he was asked whether this was the mentality he had promised the club. "It's one day. We need to repeat and repeat and again and again to know. But for sure, the mentality was very good because we knew that it was not about playing nice." Asked whether Neto had surprised him as a wing-back: "You can call him whatever. Winger, wing-back, attacking position, defending, he can do many things." Asked why his first substitution came in the ninetieth minute: "It's the 90th minute, but there were 11 minutes, so you can see it was the 79th minute." The Standard had told him at Cobham on Friday that in their previous nine trips to Everton, Chelsea had scored a meagre two goals, and he had said "Really?"; he had two by the end of the ninety.

Neto, to TNT, gave the win away. "We are really pleased. Shame for Emi but we wish you all the best. This win is for him." On the first goal: "We know that they came man-to man. In the second half we adjusted some stuff." On the finishes, both of them passed into the net rather than hit: "This comes a little bit from the new coach of the national team that says when you are near to the area you need to pass to the goal, so really happy with that." It was, the BBC noted, his first double in a Premier League game in what was his 187th appearance in the English top flight, and the first Premier League clean sheet Chelsea had kept since 17 January, twenty-two games ago. It was also their first league win at Everton since August 2022.

Beesley's verdict was headed as a reckoning: transfer window chaos finally catching up with Everton. He set the day against the 3–0 in March, the high watermark of the first season at Hill Dickinson, after which Everton failed to win any of their last seven; he reminded readers that Moyes, asked at Stamford Bridge last December whether a 2–0 had come down to fine margins, had bristled and replied "Maybe a billion-pound difference? Possibly"; and he counted eleven new faces at Chelsea since. On the right-back signed on deadline day after the first choice went to Leverkusen, he was plain: a hand in both Hull goals last week and a failure to stop the cross for Chelsea's first. On the goalkeeper: "It will be another goal that Jordan Pickford will be disappointed with." On Moshiri, in the media room an hour before kick-off, he had a word of warning for anyone tempted to nostalgia, noting that the former owner had once been willing to sell the club to 777 Partners, whose former head, the Echo reported, pleaded guilty this week to fraud. The ownership column of this diary has carried stranger weeks.

From their side, football.london's Jake Stokes called it "an impressively brave and resilient victory in Merseyside", saw Chelsea leap out of the gates after the break, and gave Henderson the afternoon's best notice from a Chelsea pen: the Everton crowd booed his every touch, and he relished the meaty clash. The Standard's Dom Smith found it rarer than that. It was, he wrote, the first meaningful Premier League match Chelsea had won north of the Midlands since early August 2022, and the last of those had been at Everton too; Chelsea had come with fight, were no longer a soft touch, and their four yellow cards by the thirty-fourth minute were "more an indication of being aggressive and up for the battle" than of anything to worry about. From Everton's end the same cards looked like something else, which is what two ends are for.

The Ratings

Marks from the Echo, football.london; the BBC readers' averages from the BBC's player rater, as they stood when this was written.

The Echo's Connor O'Neill gave his top mark to Armstrong, "Everton's best player", wrongly booked and taken off when he should not have been, and his bottom marks to Maitland-Niles, for two mistakes in the opening ten minutes and the goal, and to Nørgaard, for "a debut to forget". Tarkowski was his only other player above average. The BBC's readers put Dewsbury-Hall first among Everton's players and Nørgaard last of everyone who played, and put Neto first of everyone, at eight and a bit, which is where the Standard and football.london both put him too, the Standard naming him Chelsea's man of the match. Between the three outlets, nobody in blue got above an eight and nobody in a Chelsea shirt below a five, and the marks say what the shots said.

The Fans' Verdict

TPF had its best morning of the season and one of its worst afternoons, and the join is at 13:37. In the window from nine in the morning the board posted 220 times across 45 threads, 71 of them during the match, which it lived, as it does, in one-line threads with no match thread to hold them. The morning was the team sheet, and the board liked it: a full squad, the strongest bench in years, the sensible reading of Röhl. The first half was enjoyed as a fight, with a thread at 13:23 on going toe to toe with the glamour boys and a reply six minutes later noting that a referee getting things wrong gets the crowd going as well, which is this board's theory of atmosphere and not a bad one. Then the goal, and the thread about the Martínez days and the start of the second half; then the right-back, who was gone within six minutes of the board asking for him to be; then a thread at ten to two asking why Everton were so timid, with the body "Hard to watch"; then "This is abysmal" at twelve minutes past; then Nørgaard's first touches, which the board received as a charity appearance, as slow as hell, and as a performance in the manner of a Danish centre-half it once signed and does not speak of; then "Predictable passive and powderpuff" as Neto scored again; then "Atrocious" at the whistle, with the question of what Dibling has to do to get a game. It was not a goal-by-goal board on Saturday. There were no goals.

The argument afterwards ran from half past two until the evening and was about the bench more than the result. The board's settled view of Chelsea was that they were a different class, pacy wingers and full-backs, a creative midfield, a top striker and depth, and that there was only one winner after the break. Its settled view of its own manager was less settled. Of the substantive posts after the whistle roughly two in five were against Moyes or his selection and about one in seven defended him, and the rest were about something else, which on TPF counts as a bad day for a manager without being a mutiny. The nickname that did the rounds was prehistoric, and the charge was that he had regressed to old Moyes inside eighteen months: a right-back on the right wing, a left-winger not fit, two sitting midfielders every week, a debutant who could not run brought on with ten minutes to go while Hackney and Dibling sat, and Johnson preferred to both. "Hackney getting the Moyes treatment" was the shortest version. The defence, when it came, was arithmetic: the manager got it wrong today, but ten points from eight games is not bad, and the board that ran the end of the window is where the shortage starts. Last week the board's settled line was that until the ownership wheel stops there is nobody it would rather have; this week nobody repeated it. "15th it is then – hurrah" was the gallows line at twenty to three, and "It's a maths league apparently so 15th is our due" the reply, and at four minutes past five somebody pointed out, to no great effect, that Everton were currently seventh.

The players got less of it than the bench. Maitland-Niles was the one heated thread, and even that split between those who said he should not be playing and those who said he says himself he is not a right-back, had two men to mark, and was let down by Grealish not tracking his runner. Grealish was the board's sharpest divide: orchestrating pretty much everything in the first half to one member, a huge problem and a tribute act to another, and to most the man keeping George and Dibling out, which is where the board has been since September. Dewsbury-Hall, against his old club, was sluggish and, the board surmised, carrying a knock, which nobody at the club has said; the fixture meant nothing to the board and seemed to mean little to him. Pickford's left arm had a hole in it for the second week running, by one account, and his sight was blocked by Mykolenko, by the reply. Barry's heading was a thread of its own. Nobody was praised by name all afternoon except Armstrong, for the tackle, and the nearest thing to a man of the match was a first half. The villain was the substitution, and then the manager who made it, and then, at a distance, the goalkeeper. The board also argued about whether it should be arguing, with a thread at 14:53 telling Evertonians to pipe down and another at 15:22 asking, in the name of a board that does not believe in censorship, for a five-post limit. It was not adopted.

The stories were about the day rather than the football, which was the right way round. The member who came via Crewe on a four-carriage train got there. Another had come up on Friday and hoped the way home would not be horrendous, and the way home turned out to be the easy part. A third, leaving the ground at nine minutes past three, reported that it was so frustrating and asked what had happened in the tackle on Garner near the South Stand, because there had been lots of shouts for a red card and it was too sunny to see. At two minutes past four someone reported that Derek Temple, who scored the winner in the 1966 Cup final, had been spotted in the ground and was looking well, which was more than anybody said about the football. And the evening's thread was on the commentator's claim that the ground had booed Martínez as he was carried off: one member was appalled, another said the ground was mainly clapping and the booing was at the Chelsea chants, and a third, from the West Stand, settled it for the record: the North Stand clapped, the South Stand booed. The board had been in all four, which is how it knows.

And on Their Board

Chelsea's supporters, on The Shed End, had opened their match thread last Saturday and filled sixteen pages of it on this one, 292 posts from before dawn to tea-time, and the shape of the day was dread, boredom, relief and then outrage, in that order. Before kick-off they counted one win at Everton in nine years, called the stats a bad omen, and more than one thought a defeat pretty inevitable; one made it a test, writing that if Chelsea could not win here he would concede that the top four would be a struggle. The team news pleased them for who was not in it, and Hato's inclusion puzzled them. The first half they called scrappy and boring, garbage football with shades of Maresca, and they gave Everton's manager his due in their own way: Moyes was set up to frustrate, and it was working perfectly. They could not stand the referee either, so quick to book, and thought the home crowd booing the officials a bit rich. Then Neto scored and one of them had gone to the loo, and another decided that Alonso clearly reads his posts.

The ten minutes of Martínez's treatment turned their thread, and not towards the football. They were frightened for him, noted an anniversary of a goalkeeper of their own being badly hurt two decades ago, and were furious at the Everton booing, in terms this diary will not repeat and in a register their own end had just spent ten minutes earning. Neto's second produced "NETO AGAIN!!! GAME OVER!!!!" and a line that will be understood on any board, "24 hours of no posts about Neto being sh*te", and afterwards the word that recurred was professional: a first clean sheet in twenty-three league matches, a win ground out at a tough ground, lessons learned from Brentford, and the judgement that the Chelsea of last season would have been bullied and conceded three. Their man of the match was Neto for the goals and Acheampong for the command, and their running theme was Henderson, superb corners, experience, a huge difference in midfield, and hope, at thirty-six, for the over-thirty-fives among them. Nobody mentioned where he spent twelve years. About Everton they were respectful in the particular way of a club that has just stopped losing here: one of the hardest places for anyone to go under Moyes, who always sets his teams up well; not many teams will beat Everton away this season; and, of Dewsbury-Hall, the admission that Chelsea sold the wrong midfielder in that window. Of the youngsters and the debutant, nothing. One member, opening the thread late, assumed Chelsea had lost because it ran to fifteen pages, which is the most Chelsea sentence of the week.

Beyond TPF

The Evertonians in the diary's Bluesky packs posted 606 times between kick-off and twenty to six, and their afternoon had a different villain in each half. For the first forty-five minutes it was the referee: the booking of Armstrong was a perfect tackle, Rogers's challenge was studs up and a second yellow and a red, and the sample's temperature on officiating ran a good deal hotter than TPF's, which thought it got the crowd going and left it there. Barry's header was logged as another big miss before the corner had been cleared, and one of the most-liked lines of the first half was a picture caption, live images of all Everton's centre forwards warming up on the touchline. The second half belonged to Pickford for about three minutes, to the Chelsea end's songs about benefits for ten, and then entirely to the substitutions: Nørgaard's debut was compared to the first touches of players the sample remembered without affection, and the most-liked post of the whole day said Hackney should have come on in the second half, a very talented player who could be a leader on the pitch, while the one just behind it said the limited squad was being poorly used by the manager and that it was as simple as that; a third, asking whether Hackney was injured, called him a cracking talent and his absence baffling. The word for Moyes on Bluesky was dinosaur, said more than once and more unkindly than once; the number was two wins in fourteen, worked out before the whistle and correct, as the record below shows. And Barry's miss brought out the folklore, with Brett Angell and Jigsaw Barlow summoned by name as the yardsticks for a striker who cannot finish, which on this side of the city is said with a smile and with no wish to be proved right.

Where the two rooms differed was in temperature rather than direction: TPF was angrier at the bench, Bluesky at the referee and the manager, and both had Nørgaard. The sample's kinder moments were about the day. One supporter listened on the radio and was glad of it, having got something productive done; one was on a golf course somewhere it was still morning and the season was called fall; one had got a scooter to the match, met old friends, had a drink at the Denbigh afterwards and counted the weather among the positives, which was the whole list; and one wrote that the defeat was killing him, especially as he was trying to get his kids into it. Nobody chooses, as the advice goes. Several of them thought it poor form to boo an injured goalkeeper, whatever his supporters were singing, and said so.

Said most on Bluesky

Themes Carried Forward

The first defeat, and the number underneath it. Everton could not equal the seven unbeaten games of 2006–07, the BBC's live page noted, and the record that replaces that one is less flattering: counting back from today, Everton have won two of their last fourteen league games, the last seven of last season without a win and this season's seven with two. Seven draws and five defeats make up the rest. The table still says seventh, and ten points from seven games is a start most of the last decade would have taken; the supporters have worked out the other number for themselves and it is the one they are carrying to the Emirates. Both are true. The first will stop being true before the second does.

The substitutions, and a debut to forget. Nørgaard, signed in August with an Achilles that has kept him at what Moyes called his version of pre-season, got his first competitive minutes with five left and Everton a goal down, lost the ball to Palmer for a three-on-one, fouled Palmer for the free kick that became the second goal and was booked for it. The Echo gave him a four and said he should never have been brought on; the BBC's readers put him last of everyone on the pitch; TPF said he looked like a charity appearance; Moyes said everyone had seen it and that the club is trying to get minutes into him. The preview had him getting his first minutes with ten to go in the one job he is for, and he got the minutes without the job. Hackney and Dibling did not get on, having both come off the bench at Hull, and the board's question for Arsenal is the one it asked at the whistle.

The right-back file has a fourth entry. Maitland-Niles made two mistakes in the first ten minutes by the Echo's count, could not stop the cross for the goal, and was taken off in the fifty-fifth minute, a week after being taken off at Hull with both goals on his account. He is the reason Everton went into the game unbeaten, Beesley reminded readers, for the goal at the other end of the record in September. O'Brien, a centre-half, was unused again; Röhl, a midfielder, played the right wing and the Echo's ratings wondered aloud whether a return to right-back could be on the cards for him. The honest position has not changed since last Sunday, that Maitland-Niles stays until someone better is bought, and the sale running through the next window has not changed either.

Finishing, now with a count. Barry has attempted more shots than anybody in the Premier League this season, twenty-five, and scored three times in the league, the BBC's live page said; Moyes said on Friday that he had been told Barry had missed the most big chances in the division and chose to hear that he keeps getting there. On Saturday he got there once, from six yards, and headed it at the goalkeeper. Everton had six shots. Two came after half-time. The sample on Bluesky reached for Angell and Barlow, which is the folklore of this subject and not its verdict; the diary's view is that a team with six shots has a problem bigger than the man taking a third of them, and that the man still has to score the one he gets.

The referee, and the list that stays closed. Armstrong booked for a tackle that won the ball; Rogers not booked a second time for one that caught a knee; seven cards, a monitor the VAR did not send anyone to, and a manager who said the referees who want to be Europe's best let things go. The file of injustices this diary keeps has four entries and a very high bar, and Saturday's decisions, one wrong and one lenient by most readings outside west London, do not get near it. Tierney has now refereed Everton eleven times since 2016–17, for three wins. That is a record, not a reason.

Pickford, two weeks running. The Guardian called him unconvincing for the second week in a row; the Echo said questions are being asked again and that his distribution was poor; Beesley noted that James Trafford is the biggest challenge to his England place in nine years. He got a hand to the first goal and did not keep it out, saved well from Palmer and from João Pedro at the end, and walked the length of the pitch for a goalkeeper on the floor, which the BBC filed under the goalkeepers' union. The file opened at Hull with the wrist, and it stays open.

Grealish, George, and the door. Grealish played eighty-five minutes on the left, set up the header Barry missed and hit the volley Martínez tipped over, was isolated there for much of the second half in the Echo's reading, and was replaced by Johnson with the game being chased, a change TPF called baffling. Moyes said on Friday that George was knocking at the door and that Jack knew it; on Saturday George came through it in the fifty-fifth minute, for a right-back, and played the rest of the game without making much of it. The board's position is that an unfit Grealish keeps two young wingers out; the manager's, on the evidence of the sheet, is that a fit Grealish starts. Dibling, whose devilment the manager praised on Friday, was not used.

Dewsbury-Hall, against the club that sold him. The preview had the game turning in the pocket in front of Chelsea's defence, where Henderson was there to stand, and Henderson stood. Dewsbury-Hall made the cross for Grealish's volley and the free kick that stopped the match, curled the ball Johnson nearly reached, and otherwise looked off the pace, in the Echo's words, with the board surmising a knock. The Echo gave him a five; the BBC's readers made him Everton's best. The Chelsea board thought they had sold the wrong midfielder, which he will not have heard and would not have said.

Moyes, and a barometer going the other way. Last week the board's defence of him was that nobody better was available during an ownership sale; on Saturday that line was not repeated and the charges were. The selection was negative before a ball was kicked, by one reading, and the substitutions doubled down on it; the nickname was prehistoric and the word on Bluesky was the same. His own account was that Chelsea were better and not by much, that the run of the ball went their way when it mattered, and that the referee let things go. He is in the last year of his contract, which he says is not the most important thing, working for owners who would like to sell, and he has lost one league game in seven. The sensible choice a big club settled for has had a bad day at the office, and the office has noticed.

The owners, and a visitor. Eight days after The Friedkin Group said they would explore a sale, their team lost at home for the first time this season and the man who sold them the club walked through the media room. Beesley's verdict connected the summer's window to the afternoon's team sheet without needing a ruler: a right-back who was the fourth choice, a bench the manager would not use, one striker. The board raised the owners only in passing, as the reason days like this happen and the thing that must be sorted before anything else can be. Nothing from the club this week, as the owners promised on 9 October.

What was done to the supporters this week. A lunchtime kick-off moved in August for television; a main road into the ground closed on Thursday night for a cable repair; replacement buses on the line from the south of the city; the London support routed via Crewe by engineering works and squeezed into four carriages; and, at the end, eleven added minutes that sent a good part of the ground out early to beat a closure they had been warned about on Friday. The BBC's own reporter blamed the hour for the slow start. The Chelsea board had said nothing before the game about trains, Euston or the price, and its end spent the ten minutes of its goalkeeper's treatment singing to the home supporters about benefits, which is the one song in the repertoire this diary would not have written up and had to. Next Saturday is three o'clock at the Emirates, the last afternoon before the clocks go back, and the week after is a Thursday night cup tie and a Monday night on Tyneside.

The record. Seven played, two won, four drawn, one lost, eight scored and seven conceded, ten points, seventh. Chelsea went fourth on thirteen; Liverpool, who won 2–1 at Brentford against ten men, are fifth on twelve; Brentford, who lost, are sixth on ten with a better goal difference. Manchester City beat Ipswich 3–2 and are seven from seven. Hull lost 1–0 at Fulham. Newcastle and Aston Villa were still playing when this was written, and either could climb past Everton by the evening. Away from home Everton have gone eight league games without a win, the last at Newcastle on 28 February, and the next two away grounds are the Emirates and St James' Park. The season preview had Everton eleventh. For the first time this season the table is moving towards it.

Elsewhere

Manchester City played their first home league game since the verdict and beat Ipswich 3–2, with two from Haaland, to become only the third club in Premier League history to win their first seven games of a season. Before kick-off, the BBC reported, the home supporters booed the Premier League anthem prior to kick-off and waved inflatable bananas, a tradition revived from the 1980s, and Enzo Maresca said he and his players could only focus on the pitch while the appeal against a verdict on 114 charges runs its course. Everton's own ten points, cut to six and then two more, were taken off inside a single season under the same rules, and nobody at Goodison was given a banana. The appeal continues; the sanction is still unannounced; and the club at the top of the table is the one waiting to find out what it has won.

Sources & Caveats

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