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Before the Whistle · 24 October 2026

Arsenal (a)

Moyes goes back to Arsenal, where he has never won in thirteen league visits, a week after his side's first defeat of the season.

Unashamedly written by a machine · The suffering is real

Second edition, 14:19 · Neither Branthwaite nor Grealish is in the squad, so O'Brien partners Tarkowski, Merlin Röhl gets the right-back he said he fancied, with Eze running at him, and George and Johnson take the wings while Dibling and Hackney sit down again; Maitland-Niles is a substitute for the first time since his goal. Arsenal start Lewis-Skelly at left-back and Merino in midfield, with Havertz, Dowman and Bruno Guimarães among the finishers, so 'Where the Game Is Won' now turns on Everton's right and on a bench Moyes has to use before the eighty-fifth minute; the prediction is Arsenal 1–0, Havertz from the bench with eight minutes left.

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Everton go to the champions this afternoon a week after their first defeat, with two wins in their last fourteen league games and no away win in the league since February. Moyes would not say on Friday whether Branthwaite is fit, and Arsenal, who have let in five league goals all season, will have the ball for an hour of the ninety, so the only afternoon Everton can win here is one that is still goalless at the eightieth minute. That is when the benches decide it. Arteta's substitutes have won his last three league games, and Moyes did not send his on against Chelsea until the eighty-fifth minute, when the game had gone.

Where We Left It

With the first defeat, and with the number that came out from under it. Chelsea won 2–0 at Hill Dickinson last Saturday lunchtime, both goals Pedro Neto's: the first forty-four seconds into the second half, when Ainsley Maitland-Niles failed to stop a cross and the cutback deflected off Tarkowski to a man nobody was marking; the second in the ninetieth minute, from a free kick Christian Nørgaard had given away five minutes into his Everton career. Everton had six shots, two of them after half-time, and the best was a header from six yards that Thierno Barry put straight at Emiliano Martínez with the game still goalless. Harrison Armstrong was booked for a tackle that won the ball and Morgan Rogers was not booked a second time for one that did not. Hayden Hackney and Tyler Dibling watched all of it from the bench.

The record is now two wins in the last fourteen league games, a figure TPF had ready before the final whistle. Everton are eighth this morning on ten points, two wins, four draws and a defeat, eight scored and seven conceded, level with Brentford and Leeds on points and behind both on goal difference, and level with Ipswich, who drew with Forest in the rain on Friday night and have played a game more. Arsenal are second on eighteen, three behind Manchester City, and have let in five goals in seven games. Everton have not won a league game away from home since February. The BBC counts eight without, and the ninth attempt is at the champions.

The Week in Brief

Moyes took his press conference at Finch Farm at half past one on Friday and gave away nothing he did not have to. Asked about injuries: "We've got our share of bits and pieces and we'll keep them quiet." Asked about Jarrad Branthwaite, who picked up a knock at Hull, moved gingerly against Chelsea by the Echo's account and was missing from the training video the club put out on Thursday, he would not answer at all, which is an answer of a kind. Nørgaard he did discuss. The midfielder is "a little bit further away than we hoped"; the club had thought he could manage the last fifteen or twenty minutes against Chelsea and found that he could not, and he will not be "fully firing" until after the next international break. "Christian was the first one to come to me and say he was sorry," Moyes said, which is a decent thing to say about a man and a strange thing to have to.

On the three young players the board wanted to see instead of him, the manager reached for the club's history. "My history would suggest Leighton Baines, Phil Jagielka, Joleon Lescott and Tim Cahill might have had to wait a bit of time to become first-team regulars," he said of Hackney, Dibling and Tyrique George, adding that he was not saying these boys had to do the same. Hackney was told that when you step up there is no guarantee you will get the jersey, and that his place on the bench is partly a measure of Armstrong, who has "stepped ahead of where we thought he'd be" and has started every league game at nineteen. There is a "big consideration" of moving Jack Grealish inside, tried for a spell in a friendly against Blackburn behind closed doors. And Barry, the only striker, cannot easily be rested because "he gives us a focal point", though Moyes would if he saw the chance, and conceded that would be questioned too.

His own position came up because Christian Purslow, the former chief executive, had said this week that a new contract for the manager would bring stability. Moyes agreed that it mattered and that managers were a big part of it, then: "There's always been developments and talks have taken place. Things are a bit quiet at the moment and I'm guessing that's to do with the situation we're in." The situation is that the owners put the club up for sale a fortnight ago and have said nothing since. Pat Nevin, in his BBC column, carried the week's gloomiest line: that Everton's forward line is Barry, "valued at just 10%" of Chelsea's front three, and that "due to underinvestment, dark clouds are gathering". Tarkowski produced its plainest. "I always felt last year that anytime we suffered a defeat, we responded pretty well," Tarkowski said.

Moyes and Arteta go back twenty-one years. Moyes brought Arteta to England in January 2005, and the Spaniard played six and a half seasons for him before Arsenal bought him. Asked what his old midfielder might have taken from him, given that he has had Pep Guardiola since, Moyes said: "I don't really know. But I think he might take from me a little bit of the other side," by which he meant a winning culture, standards and how you deal with players. Of last March at the Emirates, when a side he called "pretty threadbare" held out until the eighty-ninth minute and lost 2–0, he said: "I hope we can do the same again." Arteta, at London Colney, was asked whether Moyes was the real king of the Premier League: "100%. I don't know if he's the king or what he is, but he's certainly someone that we all look up to."

The game is at three o'clock on a Saturday, where the fixture list put it, and it is not on television in this country, which Arsenal's supporters' board greeted as a kind of sorcery. It is sold out. The club's guide asks nobody to travel without a ticket, lists pints from £7, a week after Hill Dickinson's own guide promised one at £4.50, and warns that Holloway Road station is exit-only before the match and shut for two hours after it. National Rail has named the weekend's weather Storm Boelo, with a yellow wind warning across northern England from midday; Avanti West Coast is advising against travelling north of Preston on Sunday. Liverpool is south of Preston, which is the good news. The clocks go back at two tomorrow morning, so the away end gets an extra hour on the way home, and may need it.

The Hosts

Arsenal are champions, for the first time in twenty-two years, and second this morning on eighteen points, three behind Manchester City, with six wins and one defeat from seven. The defeat was 3–0 at Brighton on 19 September and it has not been repeated: Leeds, Forest and Lille beaten since, and a 2–2 in Munich on Wednesday from a goal down, Eze and Rice scoring. They have conceded five league goals, and the BBC's numbers say no side has faced fewer shots on target or a lower expected goals against. What they have not done is score much. Eleven in seven, and the last three league wins were each settled by a goal from a substitute, which the Guardian this week called mastering the art and Arteta calls his "finishers", as if a bench were a kitchen. At Forest they had 74 per cent of the ball and one shot on target, and it went in. It was their thirty-second 1–0 in the league under Arteta, a figure the BBC notes is matched over the same years by exactly one other club, and the reader will not need telling which.

Saka went off in Munich with a quadriceps injury. Arteta said on Friday that there was "quite a lot of fluid in the area" and another scan that afternoon, and the BBC's Sami Mokbel reported that the club fear up to eight weeks. William Saliba is out with his back, Christos Tzolis with the hamstring he hurt for Greece on 1 October; Piero Hincapié has trained and is available, Riccardo Calafiori is "ready" for a third game in a row, and Martín Zubimendi, who has not started a league game, "needs to earn the right to play". The shape in Munich was a 4-3-3, Raya in goal, Timber, Konsa, Gabriel and Calafiori across the back and Rice, Bruno Guimarães and Ødegaard in front of them; football.london expects White for Timber, Eze on the left for Saka, Lewis-Skelly in midfield and Gyökeres for Havertz, which is a prediction and not a line-up. On Everton Arteta said: "it's not a coincidence that they didn't lose before the last game, because they are a really good team. And we know that as well, because in recent clashes it's always been a really difficult match for us." On Max Dowman, who came off the bench against Everton in March and scored in the seventh minute of stoppage time to become the youngest goalscorer in both the Premier League and the club's history, at sixteen: "there is something inevitable to go back to that memory and the feeling of the moment." Asked whether starting the boy against the same side would be a fairytale: "It would be a great story yeah, if we win the game especially."

From their side, football.london has Everton as the side "who suffered their first top-flight defeat of the season last weekend" and, in its injury round-up, as a club "pushing for the European places", which is generous, and which Hill Dickinson will enjoy reading back in May.

The Particulars

The Team Sheet

Everton's substitutes: Travers, Keane, Maitland-Niles, Nørgaard, Hackney, Alcaraz, Dibling, King, Graham. Not in the squad: Branthwaite, Grealish.

Arsenal's substitutes: Arrizabalaga, Timber, Mosquera, Hincapié, Calafiori, Zubimendi, Bruno Guimarães, Havertz, Dowman.

The sheet answered the morning's questions and asked a larger one of its own. Branthwaite is not in the squad, which is what Moyes's silence on Friday meant, and nor is Grealish, who was not injured on Friday by any account the club or the Echo gave and about whom nothing has been said since; the BBC's list simply does not have him. Maitland-Niles is on the bench after five league starts running, so Alan Smith and both Echo writers have their way, though not quite as they drew it: O'Brien goes to the middle beside Tarkowski, and the right-back, on the BBC's reading of eleven names, is Merlin Röhl, the midfielder who told Radio Merseyside last week that he might like the position even more than the wing. He has it now, against Eze. Michael Keane is back in the squad after a week nobody explained, on the bench behind two centre-halves and a man who would like to be one.

In front of them nothing has moved: Garner and Armstrong, as all season, Dewsbury-Hall ahead of them, Barry alone. The wide places go to Tyrique George, whom the Echo picked, and Johnson, with Dibling on the bench for a seventh league game and Hackney beside him, which is the manager's Baines-and-Jagielka answer written out in names. Nørgaard, as promised, is a substitute. The bench, where last Saturday's argument was lost, has nine men on it and the same question: not who, but when. Arteta has done what football.london said he would, and one thing more. White for Timber at right-back, Eze on the left for Saka, Gyökeres for Havertz, and Myles Lewis-Skelly, expected in midfield, at left-back instead, with Calafiori, "ready" for a third game in a row, not needed for one. Rice and Mikel Merino sit in midfield with Ødegaard ahead of them, the same shape as Everton's, so Bruno Guimarães, who scored against Leeds from the bench, is on it again, and Zubimendi has still not earned the right. Dowman, whose fairytale the manager was asked about, is among the finishers, which is where his last goal against Everton came from. Nine Arsenal substitutes, and six of them would start for the away side.

Two to Watch

Everton: James Tarkowski

James Tarkowski turns thirty-four next month, has started every league game this season, scored the ninety-first-minute equaliser at Bournemouth in August, and became club captain in the summer when Séamus Coleman left. Moyes, asked about him on Friday, called him "a wee bit of a mainstay of the team" and "a little bit an anchor", said he "trains like a monster every day", and placed him among the regular Premier League centre-halves of the last decade, with Harry Maguire and Lewis Dunk for company. The Echo adds that he leads the division for duels won and is second for interceptions. He missed one game last season and it was this one: the 2–0 at the Emirates in March was played without him. He has scored against Arsenal before, the only goal of Sean Dyche's first match in charge in February 2023, when Everton beat the league leaders 1–0 at Goodison.

Why him, and not Barry or Pickford: because this is the game Everton's season is built to play. Arsenal will have the ball for an hour of the ninety and will cross it, and Tarkowski, who heads it away, organises the two in front of him and decides when the line steps up, settles whether the afternoon is still goalless at the eightieth minute, which is the only kind of afternoon Everton can win here. Gyökeres, who scored in both meetings last season and starts, is his to deal with. So is Branthwaite's absence, with O'Brien beside him instead. "Any injuries he somehow gets over them to play," Moyes said. This is the week to test it.

Arsenal: Eberechi Eze

Eberechi Eze is twenty-eight, scored the only goal of the 2025 FA Cup final for Crystal Palace, the club's first major trophy, and was sold to Arsenal, his boyhood club, for £67.5m that summer. His season so far has been a bench: one league start and four appearances off it, two Champions League starts and a third as a substitute, and two goals, both in Europe, against Lille and then in Munich on Wednesday. At Forest on Sunday he was taken off at half-time. Arteta said on Friday that he had been "certainly upset" at Forest and, three days later in Munich, "ready to come in immediately and have a huge impact"; the television cameras caught the manager making him laugh on the touchline as he waited to go on. "Ebs when he's like this and grumpy, I don't think we're going to get the best out of him," Arteta said. "When he's laughing, he's himself."

Why he matters here is Saka. Arsenal's right winger is out for weeks, so Eze starts on the left, and the left is the side Everton have spent the season trying to defend: Röhl, whom Moyes has picked, meets a player who drifts inside off the touchline and shoots from the places Everton's right-backs have been standing when goals have gone in. He has two goals in three games, football.london notes, and a point to prove to a manager who took him off. If Arsenal score from open play, the likeliest pass is his.

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Where the Game Is Won

The line-ups

Everton 4-2-3-1Arsenal 4-2-3-1

1. 1With Saka out Eze starts on Arsenal's left, which is Everton's right-back's side, the one position Moyes has filled four different ways this season.
2. 2Gyökeres scored in both meetings last season; Tarkowski missed the one at the Emirates and is the anchor Moyes says keeps the defence solid.
3. 3Arsenal have conceded five all season and faced fewer shots on target than anyone; Everton's only striker will get one chance, perhaps two.

In the first twenty minutes, and then on the bench, and in between on Everton's right, where a midfielder is learning a position against the champions. Arsenal at home score early and keep clean sheets; Everton have conceded within three minutes of a restart three times this season, and the last time they came to this ground, in March, they had five shots, their fewest in a league game until last Saturday's six. If Everton reach half-time level the afternoon is the one Moyes wants, and he has won it here before, in all but the last minute. The shape is the one he always picks and the men in it are not: Röhl at right-back with Eze coming inside off him and Lewis-Skelly, a midfielder playing full-back for the other side, overlapping outside; O'Brien and Tarkowski against Gyökeres, who scored in both meetings last season and has a header in him; Garner and Armstrong asked to find Ødegaard and Merino when they drop into the space where Rogers found room last week. Pickford's kicking will be tested by a side that presses the first pass, and Barry is ninety yards from help.

Then the other flank, which without Grealish is a different proposition. Madueke runs at Mykolenko, who has been the quiet success of the defence, and George, in Grealish's place, is nineteen and has never started a league game at this ground; the one Everton player who makes Arsenal's right-back defend rather than attack is not in the squad, so Ben White will spend the afternoon in Everton's half. Johnson on the right has Lewis-Skelly behind him, which is the one place the sheet gives Everton something to run at. Set pieces are the best route to a goal and may be the only one: Garner's delivery, Tarkowski and O'Brien in the box, Barry's head, against a side that has conceded five in the league all season and will not be expecting a sixth.

And the last half-hour belongs to the two benches, which is where the sides differ most. Arsenal's substitutes have won their last three league games, and today's finishers are Havertz, Dowman, Bruno Guimarães, Zubimendi and Calafiori, which is a second team that would finish in the top half. Everton's has Dibling, Hackney, Alcaraz and Nørgaard, and last week none of the first three came on until the game had gone and the fourth gave away the free kick that finished it. The afternoon is won, or kept, by whichever manager trusts the men behind him. Evertonians have read that sentence before and know how it usually ends.

The Mood on the Board

TPF spent the week on the manager and on the past, and gave the champions a sentence and a half. In forty-three threads and some three hundred and thirty posts since the Chelsea entry went out, Arsenal are mentioned as a result already known: a member offering a spare seat for the away end on Friday evening warned whoever took it to expect a heavy defeat in the rain, and the seat was taken inside three hours. There is no prediction thread, no team thread, nothing on trains, prices, the away end or the clocks, and nobody has mentioned Michael Keane, the Newcastle cup tie or the Manchester City case. The board has a match it would rather not think about and has arranged, with some skill, not to.

What it thought about was Moyes, and the temperature after the first defeat is as low as it has been this season. By a rough count the critics outnumbered the defenders three or four to one. The charge sheet, posted on Saturday night, ran from "the horrendous line ups" through "the frankly diabolical subs week after week" to the right-back who never arrived; the shorter version was that "every single time Moyes has a choice to make he goes for the older more experienced player", and the shortest was a thread titled with Oliver Glasner's name. The defence was conditional. A self-described Moyes appreciator wrote that the manager's starting point was how to stop rather than how to beat, and in the same post that he would still rather have him "than God knows what else we'd end up with, right now". Nørgaard's debut was the week's one unanimity, "the glaring obvious mistake", with the rider that the idea was fine and the eighty-fifth minute was not, and Hackney's splinters were counted on his behalf. Friday's news that contract talks had taken place was met with "we are being held hostage", and then, after midnight, with a long post about stability, low stress and singing side by side, which was answered at half past three in the morning with "Hear hear".

On Monday the board turned twenty-four years old, or Rooney's goal did: the last-minute winner against the champions Arsenal on 19 October 2002, five days before his seventeenth birthday, that ended their thirty-match unbeaten run and made him, then, the Premier League's youngest scorer. The thread ran to twenty-eight replies and was the week's warmest thing. One member heard the roar from Great Homer Street market, shopping with his mum and sister, and admits he has since convinced himself the memory is true. One went because he thought it might be his last chance to see Dennis Bergkamp and watched the game, from his seat, as if through a letterbox. One, eighteen and over from America, decided that afternoon which half of the city he belonged to. One had taken an Arsenal-supporting colleague from a London office into the Paddock and watched him stare at his feet while everyone went mental. Arsenal, for this board, is the day the bright spark announced himself and the start of everything the club was not equipped to do about it. It also noticed, at six minutes to six last Saturday, that Derek Temple, who scored the winner in the 1966 Cup final, had been at the Chelsea game and was looking well. Nobody chooses, and nobody leaves.

The Mood on Their Board

Arsenal Mania opened its thread for this game at seven minutes to eight on Thursday morning, after a member had declined to on Wednesday night on the grounds that making a match thread intimidated him, and a veteran came "out of self imposed match day thread retirement to help out a mate". It has forty-six posts. Of some two hundred and forty posts read across the board this week, fifteen mention Everton, Moyes, Nørgaard or Maitland-Niles, and none mentions Grealish or Pickford. The rest is Saka's thigh, the draw in Munich, which half the board thought a fine result and half a disgrace, and a forward line one member called threadbare beside a stacked midfield and defence. The Manchester City case comes up as comfort: if City are punished, "we'll win; it's obviously a two horse race".

On Everton the register is respect without anxiety. "Moyes knows how to stifle teams." "Everton will park the coach." "Lot of respect for Moyes and the way he sets them up." The prediction posted most often was 1–0 and ugly, and the last word before dawn was that nobody had ever seen a more nailed-on ugly 1–0 win in their life; 2–0, 3–1, 1–1, 0–0 and 4–0 had their takers. The two former Gunners were noticed: one member expects Maitland-Niles to be "gagging to score a worldie against us", and another remembered Nørgaard as good at Arsenal and poor last week. The three o'clock kick-off, once the thread's opener had corrected his belief that Sky were showing it, produced the week's best line from either board, a member asking what sorcery had conjured a Saturday at 3pm. Dowman's goal in March is already "one of the best Emirates moments", to people who have had rather more of them than the away end.

Their stories are weather stories. One member bagged a last-minute ticket on Friday evening and then read the forecast. Another, at three in the morning, consoled him: a bad weather day at the Emirates beats a slouch on the couch at home. A third thought rain and wind would suit Everton, which is the kindest thing anyone on either board said about Everton all week.

What It Means

For the table, a win takes Everton to thirteen points, level with Chelsea in fourth before Chelsea play Tottenham at half past five, and ends two runs at once: eight league games away without a win, and Moyes's thirteen league visits to Arsenal without one. A draw leaves Everton on eleven and probably ninth by Sunday night. Defeat leaves them on ten with Hull, Newcastle and Villa all playing on Sunday, so that a side eighth on Saturday morning could be eleventh by Sunday teatime, and "two wins in fourteen" becomes "two in fifteen", which the board has already typed.

For the football, it is the test of the one thing Everton still have now that Chelsea have taken the unbeaten record: a defence that has let in seven in seven, against a side that has let in five, scores late and has won three league games running with a goal from the bench. Everton's own bench is the week's argument, and the afternoon will show whether the manager's patience with it survives a game he cannot win by sitting still.

For the club, it is the first away game since the owners said they would like to sell, taken by Moyes, whose contract talks have gone quiet because of the situation he is in, against Arteta, the midfielder he brought to England, in front of a sold-out away end that has paid seven pounds a pint and will travel home into a named storm with the clocks going back. Then Newcastle twice in five days, the cup on Thursday and St James' Park on the Monday after. Everton have one win in their last thirty league trips to Arsenal, the BBC counts, and that one was played to nobody. A point would be a result. A goal would be news.

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