TITLE RACE THROWN WIDE OPEN

ARSENAL were given a brutal reminder that Premier League titles aren’t handed out in

February.

Mikel Arteta’s runaway pacesetters strode into Goodison Park with a swagger that suggested they had done enough to take home three points by simply turning up.

Ninety minutes later, Arteta (left) had to rush on to the pitch to prevent Oleksandr Zinchenko from making a chastening defeat even worse by getting himself into a confrontation with referee David Coote.

Zinchenko had been lucky to escape with just a yellow card in the dying seconds for an off-the-ball swipe at Everton sub Neal Maupay as the Gunners’ attempts at trying to cancel out James Tarkowski’s header descended into desperation.

Luckily for the Ukrainian, his manager recognised the signs and ushered him away from the match officials while Goodison celebrated a victory that was as important to Sean Dyche’s cause as it was devastating for Arteta.

“What we must do is understand who we are, understand how we got where we are and then start to do the basic things right again,” said Arteta. “If we start to do better, individually and collectively, then you earn the right to win games.

“In the last 10 or 15 minutes, particularly after we made the changes, we started to give away a lot of free-kicks and made a lot of rash decisions.

“I think Everton were really good. We have to congratulate them for how they’ve turned things around and how they made it difficult to win the game because they were really efficient. But from our side it’s disappointing because we didn’t get the result that we wanted.

“And the performance also didn’t reflect what we’ve been doing.”

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