Inevitability is a dangerous sensation in football. Nothing is ever certain. No matter how great the overall feeling of dominance, no matter how impressive the possession statistics are, at some point a team has to actually put the ball into the net. For a long time on Saturday it felt like Arsenal would eventually score. They had to. They had all the ball. They only played against Everton. There were enough chances and half-chances to maintain the general feeling that the breakthrough was coming. But that wasn’t the case – and so with Liverpool losing a point, another chance to reduce the gap to the top was missed.

For the second week in a row, Arsenal appeared to be out of ideas against a team that stood deep and defended in numbers – although they were perhaps unlucky not to have been awarded a penalty for Vitalii Mykolenko’s late tackle on Thomas Partey. It has now been three and a half league games since they scored from play. It’s one thing to make set pieces a virtue, quite another to make them the only means of attack. Twice early on, Martin Ødegaard missed the target from good positions and then, after being blocked by Bukayo Saka on the half-hour mark, his shot hit James Tarkowski and Jordan Pickford on an eccentric route over the crossbar. Pickford saved an attempt from Gabriel Martinelli and then came into his own early in the second half to parry a volley from Saka.

Slowly the grumbling feeling of frustration increased. There were many crosses, but only a few of them were good. It was all a bit like Fulham last week: Arsenal created more chances than their opponents without really exploiting their lead. Ødegaard, whose return from injury was so crucial to Arsenal’s recent upturn in form, was called off after an hour. He had had three good chances and occasionally had a clash with Saka, but as at Craven Cottage he didn’t control the game as well as he could.

Everton’s threat was extremely limited. Abdoulaye Doucouré took quite a while after being freed by Orel Mangala, allowing Gabriel to come back and make a block. But it hardly mattered; Their task was to thwart Arsenal and make it 0-0 – which they did with relative ease, partly through their organization and resilience, partly through the excellence of Pickford and partly through wasted time, for which they received two yellow cards.

There’s a strange feeling that in these days of play, Arsenal are a distracting imposition between the real business of corners. Perhaps they are necessary context setting Longueursjust like even the schlockiest thriller needs some argument between the shootouts and car chases. Still, it’s the scenes everyone wants to see, presented with a great dramatic pause before the delivery to the pits. However, of all the teams in the modern Premier League, Everton are the ones who have the least problems with balls into the penalty area. Sean Dyche lives for set pieces; It’s almost an insult to his professional pride to believe that you can beat your team through dead balls alone.

It wasn’t until the fourth of five corners (plus a free-kick from outside that Ødegaard fired into the box) that Arsenal had problems with Everton in the first half, but Pickford, backing away, was able to control the ball away. Mikel Merino managed the first corner of the second half, a follow-up from Saka, but his header landed directly at Pickford. How do you deal with Arsenal’s dead ball threat? How to expose Nicolas Jover, your great author of the dead ball? It really helps to have two strong centre-backs who are as good in the air as Tarkowski and Jarrad Branthwaite.

And if you’ve managed to mitigate Arsenal’s set-piece threat of late, you’ve come a long way from keeping them calmer in general. Arsenal are not out of the title race yet, but the margin of error for the rest of the season is getting smaller and smaller.