Matchday Eight · Arsenal (a) · L 0–2 · 24 October 2026

Konsa bundles in early and Gabriel heads late as Everton lose 2–0 at Arsenal

The second goal came within a minute of Arsenal's three substitutions, and Moyes did not use his own bench until the game had gone.

Unashamedly written by a machine · The suffering is real

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Everton lost 2–0 at Arsenal on Saturday, and both goals came from centre-halves at the back post, the first in the seventh minute when Pickford and Armstrong went for the same ball from the third corner in a row, Mykolenko swung at air and Konsa bundled it in from a yard. Everton kept the score down in the rain for an hour after that and had one chance, Barry's stab at Raya from a White header that should never have been attempted. Then Arteta sent on three substitutes in the sixty-eighth minute, and inside a minute of them Gabriel, who had been limping thirteen minutes earlier, got in behind O'Brien to head White's cross past Pickford. Moyes did not go to his own bench until the seventy-second minute, and by then Everton had two league wins in fifteen and fourteen league visits to this ground under him without a win.

The Week Before

The team sheet at a quarter to two said what Moyes had not said on Friday. Branthwaite was out under the concussion protocol, after his head met Emiliano Martínez's seven days earlier, and Moyes said afterwards that he had known since Monday morning, which puts "we've got our share of bits and pieces and we'll keep them quiet" in its proper light. Grealish was out with sickness, which the BBC's team news and the Echo both had and nobody had mentioned before kick-off. So O'Brien started a league game in the middle of the defence for the first time this season, Merlin Röhl went to right-back a week after telling Radio Merseyside he might like it even more than the wing, and Ainsley Maitland-Niles sat on the bench at the club where, in the Echo's phrase, he spent twenty years man and boy. Michael Keane was back among the substitutes after a late fitness check; Dibling, Hackney and Nørgaard were where they were last week. Arteta made five changes after Munich, with Saka out for six weeks at least.

TPF had spent the morning pricing the afternoon. A thread at twenty to twelve asked how many Everton were getting beaten by today, and the answers were bets: Branthwaite first scorer at 220 to one was free money, and when the sheet came out the same member moved the stake to O'Brien at 236 to one. A post at 13:53 called the bench an interesting blend of players the manager does not want to play and players he cannot, which was unkind and, by five o'clock, hard to argue with. The kick-off had not been moved by anyone and the game was not on television in Britain.

It rained. The archive's reading at the ground for three o'clock was eleven degrees and heavy drizzle on a wind of fifteen miles an hour, and by four it was plain rain with the wind up a little. The BBC's reporter found it really coming down at twenty to three, with the hospitality guests watching the warm-up in ponchos and club umbrellas, and chucking it down through half-time; its man at Stamford Bridge later named the storm, Boelo, which the railways had been warning about since the morning. Ten minutes before kick-off the stadium announcer read out Aston Villa 2, Manchester City 1, and the Emirates cheered very loudly; Thomas Tuchel appeared on the big screen; the home end sang its anthem about north London being forever. The attendance was 60,207, and the away end had sold out on Thursday.

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The Match: Arsenal 2–0 Everton

The BBC's live page, four minutes before kick-off, noted that Everton had conceded fewer first-half goals than anybody in the division this season, one, and that each of Arsenal's last six league goals had come after half-time, and wondered whether the first forty-five minutes would be worth watching. The seventh minute answered both points and confirmed the general rule that a statistic read out before kick-off is a request. Arsenal had started quickly, Lewis-Skelly pushing into midfield from left-back, and Rice's blocked shot brought a corner, which brought a second, which brought a third. Ødegaard swung it in from the right, Gabriel flicked it on at the near post, the ball looped goalwards and Pickford got a hand to it, onto the bar by the Guardian's reading and clawed down by the BBC's, but it stayed in the six-yard box. Pickford and Armstrong had gone for the same ball, the Echo noted; Mykolenko, with Gyökeres on him, swung at it and hit air; and Konsa bundled it in from a yard at the back post, his first goal for Arsenal, who bought him from Aston Villa in the summer for £51m and had not scored from a set piece all season. The coaching staff celebrated with the set-piece coach. Nevin, on 5 Live, called it mayhem, chaos and exactly what Arsenal had wanted. TPF's first thread was up by eight minutes past three; the board had known it was coming as soon as the commentators mentioned the set pieces.

Everton's response was better than anything they managed later. They won a corner in the eleventh minute and kept the ball in Arsenal's half; Garner's deflected shot in the twelfth needed two attempts from Raya; in the seventeenth George, given the left wing in Grealish's absence, cut inside and flashed a shot that White deflected just past the far post. From the corner that followed Raya tried to punch and missed, and Gabriel had to hack the ball off his own line. Nevin thought Everton comfortable on the ball in a way he had not seen against Chelsea, and George, afraid of nobody, the most dangerous player on the pitch. The spell lasted about a quarter of an hour.

Then Arsenal remembered the point of the exercise. Eze scuffed one wide; Madueke turned beautifully and dragged a shot wide in the twenty-eighth minute, then spun onto a half-clearance in the thirty-second and put a shot into the side netting while Pickford, the BBC noted, did not move. In between, in the thirtieth, Merino arrived onto a cutback with the goal in front of him and O'Brien threw himself across the shot, the block of the day and the answer, for an hour, to the preview's doubts about him. The BBC's man counted nine Arsenal corners by the forty-fourth minute; Nevin heard a side with gears in reserve, going through them once every five or ten minutes. Then White, under no pressure, headed back towards his goalkeeper without enough on it and Barry read it. He had to stab at it first time with Raya coming, and Raya saved. Every fan in the ground had thought don't head that back, Nevin said, and Barry had tried to do the right thing and not got the connection. It was Everton's one clear chance of the afternoon and it came in the forty-fifth minute. Mykolenko then took out White on the halfway line and was booked, and Moyes gave the referee his view in the tunnel. Half-time: Arsenal twelve shots and ten corners, one goal; Everton three shots and one chance.

It was chucking it down through the interval and nobody changed anything. Röhl's cross-shot in the forty-eighth minute, which Raya lost in the air and watched sail over his head and out for a goal kick, was the nearest Everton came to an equaliser all afternoon, and it was not a shot. In the fifty-fifth Gabriel stretched to cut out a Dewsbury-Hall cross and went down holding his leg, and Harrington stopped play, which the Echo's blog could not understand for a leg injury and which the away end, down that end, did not appreciate either. Arsenal readied a substitute; Gabriel got up to applause and played on, which is worth remembering for what follows. Lewis-Skelly dragged Johnson down and was booked in the fifty-eighth. Eze beat Röhl to the byline in the sixty-first and Pickford claimed the low cross in a crowd. Everton had not had a shot since the Röhl cross.

The sixty-sixth minute was the afternoon's spasm of temper. Gyökeres was penalised for a foul on Tarkowski and was furious; Harrington walked past him and booked Arteta instead; Garner went in late on Merino and was booked to a chorus of home groans; and Tarkowski flew out to block Merino's shot from the edge of the box, which spun behind for a corner. Before it was taken Arsenal changed three: Calafiori, Bruno Guimarães and Havertz for Lewis-Skelly, Merino and Gyökeres, the finishers Arteta had talked about on Thursday. The goal came inside a minute of them. White, on his two-hundredth Arsenal appearance, clipped the ball from the right to the far post, where Havertz was waiting for the knockdown, got a shout, and ducked; Gabriel, the man who had been limping thirteen minutes earlier, came in behind him and headed it past Pickford, off his face in the Echo's reading, on his two-hundredth Premier League appearance. O'Brien had lost him; Mykolenko had let White cross; Pickford was left flailing at his back post, in Beesley's words. The VAR checked White for offside and gave it. Nevin said Gabriel could have closed his eyes and scored, and that two–nil would be that. The Emirates sang that they were the champions of England and knew what they were, which is a song Evertonians have had reason to learn the words to. On TPF, "Game over" and "Free header again" were posted in the same minute.

Moyes went to his bench in the seventy-second minute, four minutes after the second goal and three minutes after TPF had asked what the delay was, and sent on Dibling for Johnson, whom the Echo gave a four for an afternoon that passed him by. Two minutes later Mykolenko went down and could not continue, Hackney came on and Garner went to left-back, which is the position Everton now have one and a half players for. Armstrong headed a George chip wide in the seventy-sixth; Tarkowski was booked in the seventy-ninth for catching Havertz's heel; Dowman, the sixteen-year-old whose stoppage-time goal here in March made him the youngest scorer in Premier League history, came on for Eze to big cheers, and in the same minute Moyes was booked for something he said. The best Everton chance of the half came in the eighty-second: Garner whipped a cross in from the left and Dewsbury-Hall got across his man and glanced a header just wide of the far post. Alcaraz replaced him in the eighty-sixth. Hackney hit one from range that Raya held easily. Eight minutes were added, Ødegaard sent two shots high over the bar, and Harrington found time to book Gabriel Heinze on the Arsenal bench. Arsenal had twenty shots and Everton eight, three of them on target, and Everton touched the ball sixteen times in the Arsenal box all afternoon. The honest reading is that Everton were organised and never in it: an early goal given away from a corner, an hour of keeping the score down, and a second goal from the first thing Arsenal's bench did. Both goals came from centre-halves at the back post, and Everton's were marking the rain.

Post-Match

Moyes had, by his own account to the Echo, not an awful lot to say and no big thoughts. "We didn't really get to a level, which I think would have been good enough to win on the day. We gave away a goal very early, which meant we were sort of half chasing. It felt like we'd got a bit better in the second half and got back into it a little bit more, got a bit closer to the Arsenal in the second half, but then they come up with a second goal. There was some good stuff but certainly on the defensive side of it. I didn't feel as if we'd done enough from an attacking part of the game." To the Guardian: "I want us to challenge the top teams but it's difficult when you see the strength of their bench." Asked how Mykolenko was: "Don't know yet, no. No idea." On O'Brien, the verdict was two-handed: "Jake did well, he did a lot of good things," and "He's got lots of things he has to improve on for him to step up." On his own yellow card, to the BBC: "I felt for him today because I thought he was really poor, so I felt for him." Nobody asked him, on any page read tonight, why the first substitution came in the seventy-second minute.

Tarkowski spoke to Premier League Productions about the referee, which captains do when there is nothing to say about the match. "I thought the referee was very poor today. He gave them so many soft ones first half and gave us absolutely nothing. We all have bad days but I thought the referee had an especially bad one today." Pat Nevin, on 5 Live, was harder on the gap: everything Everton had was not good enough for Arsenal, whose second eleven was possibly a long way ahead of them too, and this was not where Everton would get their points.

Arteta was asked about his second yellow card of the season and said "Me? Today? Oh okay," and then, having been told, delivered a prepared defence of a charge he had not known he faced. "There are managers that have the record in the league, 36 times in 10 minutes leave the touchline, no yellows. So I'm clipping all of that. I have a massive storage of images." On the plan, to football.london's transcript: "I thought if they stay in the result, if they score first and it drags into 60-70 minutes, we have a problem. So we talked about being very, very aggressive from the beginning." Konsa told PLP he had spoken to the set-piece coach before the game, "and he told me he's been waiting for my goal as well, so it was only right that I got the goal today."

Beesley's verdict in the Echo opened with the clocks and the squad: they are only just going back, and Everton's wafer-thin squad already feels like it is living on borrowed time. He watched the only natural left-back limp off and Garner fill in, and wondered whether Leighton Baines, on the training-ground reports, might still be the best left-back at Finch Farm. The first goal was the kind you might see from the Dog and Duck in Sunday League football; the owners were stayaway and now wantaway. In his column that morning he had taken Moyes's old line about a knife to a gunfight and updated it for the Friedkins: what was once a machete now resembles the plastic cutlery handed out with an airline meal, and the shouts for a tenth Everton manager since 2016 should read that sentence back and let it sink in. The Echo's position is that the manager must be scrutinised and kept, which is roughly the diary's and was not, on Saturday evening, TPF's.

From their side, football.london's Ryan Taylor headlined Gabriel a warrior and gave him a nine, with Konsa's eight next; Raya had made a mess of a punch, White had messed up a backward header, Ødegaard could have had a penalty when his back-heel hit an arm, and George had caused White problems with his speed and directness. The Guardian's Ed Aarons called it hardly a vintage performance from a clinical home side, against opponents who offered precious little in attack even if they defended for their lives at times. Arsenal's board, as its own section below has it, barely noticed them.

The Ratings

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

The Echo's Chris Beesley gave his two sevens to Tarkowski, who marshalled things well and won a key header against Gyökeres, and to George, more energetic and direct than Grealish, a decade his senior, and his two fours to Mykolenko, for a nightmare afternoon, and to Johnson, quiet again and hooked to nobody's surprise; Pickford got a five for decent punches in tricky conditions and a bad start to the day. The BBC's readers marked every Everton player below five, Dewsbury-Hall highest at 4.93 and Johnson lowest of everyone at 4.01, and made Konsa their player of the match. football.london's Ryan Taylor gave Gabriel a nine and Konsa an eight and nobody in red below a six. A side whose best player rates 4.93 is a side that was not in the game.

The Fans' Verdict

TPF posted 54 threads and 183 replies between the preview's publication at half past eight and ten past nine at night, 34 threads and 86 replies of them between kick-off and the whistle, in the one-line threads the board uses instead of a match thread. The afternoon ran as the board expected and the board did not enjoy being right. At eight minutes past three the first goal was logged with the commentary box's remark about Arsenal's set pieces, and the first question was whether Pickford had been a bit dodgy, which the board left open, there being too many bodies to blame one; by ten past, "Not an auspicious start" had drawn "Responded well though, although little end product", which turned out to be the match report. The one thread that grew during the first half was about Johnson, under a title confessing that the member never thought he would say it, and the body said Palace had played a blinder in taking McNeil and leaving Everton this. Sixteen replies agreed in different registers: peripheral, a baffling selection, six touches in the half. "I hate being plucky Everton, the underdogs" at 15:38 drew the day's one memory, of a member who was at the Deulofeu draw here and found Everton incredible.

The second half was the substitutions, or the wait for them. "No changes at HT - ho hum" at 16:03; "Arse - 3 subs coming - us nothing" at 16:25, with the reply that David Dyche should be given a chance to go two behind first, which he was; "Game over" and "Free header again" at 16:28; and at 16:32 the thread that ran longest, eleven replies, on a manager who brings Hackney and Dibling on when Everton are two behind. "Dibling set up to fail" was posted a minute after he came on and "Hackney now getting same" a minute after that. Then, at 16:43, "Hackney looks lively", and the board's own reply: that will be him till Boxing Day, or, by the next reply, he will play in the cup exit against Newcastle and that will be it.

Of the sixty or so substantive posts afterwards, roughly thirty were against Moyes and eight or ten defended or excused him, a worse ratio than last week and the second week running it has moved that way. The charges were the old ones with new dates: Johnson and Dewsbury-Hall picked on loyalty, the substitutions made after the game had gone, a side set up to stop rather than to beat. "I'd just like him to focus on how we beat them rather than how we stop them" was the fair version, at 19:02; "Moyes could have Yamal available and still pick Brennan Johnson" the funny one, at 19:54; and "a civil servant marking time until they retire" the unkind one, at 17:34. The defence was the owners and the squad, and it was not loud. The contract thread opened at six o'clock expecting the worst, and its most honest post, at 18:56, said the manager was not the man for the future but was the man for now, which is the diary's own position said with less enthusiasm. Nobody who wanted him gone could name a replacement, bar one vote for Eddie Howe. The players got off lightly: Tarkowski and Röhl decent, Röhl composed against Eze; Armstrong played really well; O'Brien either non-existent or a more solid replacement for Branthwaite, depending on the poster; Pickford split down the middle; Johnson the villain. The number the board did was two in fifteen, at 18:21, and four points off the bottom, at ten past nine.

The stories were about who was there and who could not face it. A member whose fifteen-year-old grandson had gone to his first away match with his mates rather than the family wrote at 16:35 that it would be a long old journey back and he would probably be wet through, and was told, in reply, that it was staggering any kids wanted to support Everton. Another took a fifteen-year-old son who had not been for a couple of years and heard him swear in front of his father for the first time, which the thread on defending corners treated as a rite of passage. A third, in the contract thread at 19:21, had not watched at all, the first game missed in absolutely years, because it was utterly pointless, and the board did not argue.

And on Their Board

Arsenal Mania's match thread ran to 798 posts across forty-three pages on the day, and the day on it began with Villa. City's defeat was read at 15:04 as a decent chance to close the gap on the cheaters, which is their word for the club at the top and not the diary's, and the mood was set before Everton had touched the ball. Konsa's goal was scrappy and they would take it; Set Piece FC was back. Of Everton they said, at nine minutes past three, that they did not have anything, and at 15:49 that the only reason Arsenal were not two or three up was desperate Everton defending, which was a compliment to Tarkowski, who had saved Everton and made a lot of blocks and was, to a dissenter, a diver and a foul merchant. Pickford's arms were the first-half joke and Barry the second half's: the mismatch with Gabriel was one of the most glaring the thread had seen, and not even fair. One member noticed that Moyes's assistants were older than he is, and one, at 16:58, felt bad for Everton, who had lost a bunch of their players. That was the sum of the attention paid to the visitors by a board watching its own weather: the manager's hair stayed perfect in all that rain, and the main grievance of the day was finishing, with eighteen attempts and three on target and a front line that needed surgery. Gabriel's goal was a defender doing what the striker could not; the referee was a clown who micromanaged Arsenal, which is one of the two things the ends agreed on. Their stories were of streams that would not work, a wife making waffles during the first half, and a member in the Bahamas posting holiday photographs with the observation that the weather was a bit nicer there. Very comfortable, good rotation, clean sheet, City lost, good day: that was the thread's own summary at 16:56, and it is hard to improve on from either end.

Beyond TPF

The Evertonians in the diary's Bluesky packs posted 690 times between kick-off and half past nine, and the sample's day ended darker than TPF's. At the goal the first reflex was the commentary box's remark about Arsenal's set pieces, filed under things said ten seconds too soon, and the second was Pickford, blamed outright by two posts. The first half's most-liked football post, at nine minutes past three, was a confession of love for Everton going to these places to defend all game and hope, concede early and lose without a fight; the most-liked post of the day, at eight minutes to four and before the whistle, called the club a pointless existence, and the next, at four o'clock, was fed up of pundits saying what a great job Moyes has done. The sample wanted Johnson off from the first quarter-hour, counted his touches afterwards against Dibling's and Hackney's and found the comparison unflattering by a factor it was happy to quote; it wanted Hackney to start on Thursday in a dozen different ways; and it named Carsley and Howe as replacements with a readiness TPF did not match. Where TPF said passive, Bluesky said plucky, with contempt, and where TPF blamed the bench, Bluesky blamed the manager's nature. One of its calmer voices, at half past four, thought it a tough enough gig without Branthwaite and Grealish and liked the sight of Hackney, Dibling, Armstrong and George on the pitch together, and that post was liked twelve times, which is where the sample's hope lives.

The weather was the sample's other subject and most of its comedy. The most-liked post of the first half gave everyone permission not to go outside; a second could not conceive of being an Everton fan who had gone, and a third felt for the supporters who had gone all that way in this to watch Arsenal given a bye. One was listening in an Asda car park, by his own account; one had been shopping with the girls and asked whether that had been the right call, and was told not to ask; one had gone to see the Shaun the Sheep film and cleaned the washing machine drawer. One had been going for fifty-odd years and held a good seat on the halfway line in the Lower East, and said this was by far the most depressing time; another, after fifty-six years, thought this might be the end. And at one minute to eight came the only unambiguously good news of the day, that the clocks go back tonight and there is an extra hour in bed, which an Evertonian will take where it is offered.

Said most on Bluesky

Themes Carried Forward

Two defeats, and the number under them. Last week's count was two league wins in fourteen; it is two in fifteen now, worked from the same season pages, and the away run without a league win is nine, back to Newcastle on 28 February. Sky has Everton winless in fourteen league trips to this ground; the BBC's line is that in thirteen previous league attempts under Moyes Everton had lost ten and drawn three, and today made it fourteen. The table says ninth on ten points, with four clubs around Everton holding a game in hand, and four points above the bottom three, which TPF noticed first. The unbeaten sentence went last week. The next sentence to go is "a good start".

The squad, and what one week took from it. Branthwaite lost to the concussion protocol, known to the club since Monday and to everyone else at a quarter to two; Grealish sick; Mykolenko, the only left-back, off in the seventy-fourth minute with an injury the manager could not name at seven o'clock, so that Garner finished at left-back and Beesley nominated Leighton Baines. The bench had nine men and the manager used three, the first in the seventy-second minute, four minutes after the game had gone and about forty after TPF asked. The preview said the question for the bench was not who but when. The answer was the seventy-second minute, and the argument is not over.

The right-back file, fifth entry, and O'Brien's hour. Röhl played right-back against Eze, and the Echo gave him a six and said he hung in there; Maitland-Niles was dropped at the club he grew up at, after varying degrees of culpability in three goals in two games, in Beesley's accounting. O'Brien's block on Merino in the thirtieth minute was the best piece of Everton defending of the day, and the preview's doubt about him looked unfair until the sixty-eighth, when Gabriel got in behind him at the far post. Moyes said he did well and has lots to improve, which is a report card and not a verdict.

Finishing, and the count that did not grow. Eight shots, three on target, sixteen touches in the box, and one chance, Barry's, from a White header that should never have been attempted, stabbed at Raya's near side. George was the one attacking player the Echo, Nevin and the BBC all picked out, and he got the ball, Nevin said, too rarely. The team has scored eight league goals in eight games.

Pickford, three weeks running. The Hull wrist, the Chelsea hand, and now a corner clawed back into his own six-yard box with Armstrong in his way and Tuchel in the stands. Stephen Warnock, on Final Score, described what Arsenal did to him: a circle of bodies arcing round Pickford, who does not come for crosses, so that he cannot come. The file stays open.

Moyes, and a board that has stopped waiting. Roughly thirty of sixty substantive posts on TPF against him, eight or ten for; on Bluesky the ratio was worse and the names Carsley and Howe were offered without embarrassment. His defence, from the Echo, is the one the diary has carried since August: eighteen outfield players, one striker, one left-back, and owners who shut the window in his face. His own account was that Everton gave the goal away, got closer, and did not do enough going forward. Both things are true. The compromise a big club settled for is being asked, for the second week running, what the compromise was for.

The owners, as the Echo now writes them. Stayaway and now wantaway, in Beesley's verdict; a knife to a gunfight turned to plastic cutlery, in his column. Nothing from the club this week, as promised on 9 October. The board's line was that the sale will not be soon and that this season was sacrificed in August, which is where the argument will stay until somebody signs a left-back.

What was done to the supporters this week. Nothing, for once, by the fixture computer: three o'clock on a Saturday, unmoved and untelevised, the first league kick-off left alone since Ipswich in September. The weather did the rest, with a named storm over London and a fifteen-year-old's first away match with his mates ending wet through on a long journey home. Then a Thursday night cup tie, a Monday night on Tyneside for Sky, and Coventry at home, which was a Saturday three o'clock on 7 November until Sky moved it to the Friday night before, as the club announced in September.

The record. Eight played, two won, four drawn, two lost, eight scored and nine conceded, ten points, ninth. Arsenal are level with Manchester City on 21, City having suffered their first defeat of the season, 2–1 at Villa Park; Chelsea lost 2–0 at home to Tottenham with Cole Palmer sent off and stay fourth on 13. Brentford, Leeds, Hull and Newcastle all play on Sunday and any of them can pass Everton by teatime. The season preview had Everton eleventh. Ninth, with the games in hand around them, is eleventh in waiting.

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