Everton and Arsenal’s goalless draw at Goodison Park illustrated to their new managers the size of the task they each face in lifting their clubs out of the gloom

Two households, both alike in timidity. For Everton and Arsenal the shake-ups start on Sunday but there must have been times when their respective new managers, perched in the directors’ box, wished they could include mind over matter in the list of skills for which they had been recruited. Carlo Ancelotti and Mikel Arteta inherit teams that need pretty much everything knocking into them: common sense, confidence, patterns of play, how not to miscontrol a five-yard pass into touch. They could not do that from up high and instead had to chew over a dire affair whose scruffiness may not be outdone all season.

During one particularly grim sequence Ancelotti, sitting alongside Bill Kenwright, could be seen wanly shaking his head. Midway through another, a pensive bite on his spectacles. Too late, Carlo. He had already made a brisk first public appearance. His much-trailed arrival was confirmed an hour and 10 minutes before kick-off and it was not long before, as he was shown towards his seat, he could be seen grinning into a succession of cameraphone lenses. He made the time; Ancelotti may be a serial winner but he is clubbable, a twinkle never too far beneath those arched eyebrows, and knows how to charm his public. Attracting a manager of his calibre is a clear sign of the direction in which Everton wish to travel but a certain earthiness goes down well here and the club’s inertia is hardly suited to airs and graces.

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This was more familiar territory to Arteta, whose five years spent here as a player moulded his career in English football, but his reception was of a lower key as he sat alongside the Arsenal technical director, Edu. He had already offered the Arsenal-watching world his mission statement in a steely press conference on Friday evening. “I wanted to tell them a few things that we are looking at tomorrow which are very relevant to me,” he said, but that was the extent of his intervention. All Arteta could do from there was sit back, watch the callow team that walked out in a pointed selection by Freddie Ljungberg, and judge silently.

At half-time the obvious joke was to ask whether there would be two empty seats in the gods when the teams re-emerged. It had certainly been the kind of match one would ideally watch only under duress, littered with miscommunications and awry connections, many of them small but most of them sufficient to create an overriding impression of sheer confusion.

Arsenal were working hard, the youngsters in their front four pressing diligently when out of possession and the makeshift left-back, Bukayo Saka, putting in a performance that bordered on the revelatory. Everton, injury-struck but more experienced, had rather less excuse for the cavernous void of inspiration.

All of this was being directly overseen by two seasoned clubmen for whom this was one final fling before returning to the shadows. The throwing-forward of the narrative, the insistence on what this might all mean for Ancelotti and Arteta, gave the action itself a sense of being by the by, a means to an end, that ultimately self-fulfilled.

Ljungberg had primed Arteta by lighting a fire under his charges, naming Alexandre Lacazette, Nicolas Pépé and Mattéo Guendouzi on the bench while explaining that Mesut Özil would not have been involved even if he had been fit. Even as the second half tapered down, having flickered enough before the hour mark to suggest a few heads had been cleared, he opted not to make full use of his substitutes. Arteta knows he has a troubled dressing room to fix; by opting so nakedly for youth and willing ears here, Ljungberg underscored the point in triplicate.

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Duncan Ferguson stalked, besuited, around the other technical area until the second half, when naturally he dispensed with his jacket as the temperature plummeted. His send-off at the end was rapturous, the fist-pump towards the directors’ box heartfelt, his bounding around inside the stadium’s corridors afterwards puppy-like. Ancelotti will need to ensure these players inspire, and preferably feel, similarly strong emotions. The concern is that, while players such as Gylfi Sigurdsson and Richarlison are talents who should be brought sharply up to speed by a coach whose man-management skills are beyond reproach, some of Everton’s less-celebrated names may be more difficult to elevate in the manner he knows best.

Midway through the second period, Arsenal’s away support broke out into a chant in opposition to a new-media outlet that many feel has epitomised the oppressive fractiousness Arteta must heal. “Arsenal Fan TV, get out of our club,” they sang, and it brought to mind Arteta’s words that anyone around Arsenal who had a “negative effect … is not good enough for this environment or this culture”. He was almost certainly not only referring to those players towards whom Ljungberg clearly harbours disgust. Whatever his longer-term vision, and whatever that of Ancelotti, this was the kind of afternoon that highlighted just how desperate both of these clubs are for an uplift.