FA PREMIER LEAGUE:Everton 1 Aston Villa 1. IT IS that time of year when the clocks have gone back and the Premier League reverts to the yellow football.

This is normally Everton’s cue to begin an ascent of the table. In their 10th game last season David Moyes’s side recorded a 1-0 win at the Reebok to arrest a five-game winless streak and move from 14th to 12th at the start of an upward trajectory that would take them to a fifth-place finish for the second year in a row.

This flat and uninspiring game should not have lifted anything, but in an unusually condensed Premier League this workaday point was enough to lift both clubs one position. That is a position closer to the Europa League places these two clubs have made their own over the past two seasons – positions that are at risk from the monied arrivistesat Manchester City, as well as from Tottenham Hotspur and Sunderland.

Despite only three wins in their opening 10 games, Everton are far from cut adrift and remain only six points behind Martin O’Neill’s team, who are breathing the same rarefied air as the aspiring classes.

Moyes is averse to using a depleted squad as an excuse for a sluggish start, even if the Finch Farm training ground has at times this season resembled a first world war field-hospital. While his players convalesce, the Scot has been happy to see those teams above Everton wounding each other and preventing his side’s league season from being declared dead in the water.

“The tightness of the Premier League means that we are not a million miles away and it is interesting that we know that we are not hitting our standards and we are not miles and miles away,” said Moyes.

“But we also know that there’s been a lot of teams improved in the Premier League and one or two who have come back to us, and we know that we have to do better ourselves.”

Villa’s substitute John Carew equalised 46 seconds after the interval, with his first touch, after Diniyar Bilyaletdinov had put Everton on course for a first win of October with a goal in first-half injury-time.

At times the summer signing from Lokomotiv Moscow looked to be on another level from his team-mates, at others he seemed on another wavelength, and the three-match suspension he picked up for a straight red card for a foul on Stiliyan Petrov will not help the left winger’s integration.

His 87th-minute dismissal was for a two-footed tackle that appeared clumsy rather than malicious and may have been harsh, but the referee evened things up three minutes later by showing Carlos Cuellar a second yellow.

Martin O’Neill has yet to experience a league defeat at Goodison Park but he said a point at Everton is “always good”, and, with Liverpool and Tottenham both losing, it means Villa gained ground on those sides immediately above them in what he described as a “strange” league table.

“I thought that last year had a really strange look about it because there were a lot of draws and it almost divided itself up in a strange sort of way and there was almost a half and another half,” the Villa manager said.

“Interestingly, because there are so few draws, it is kind of lopsided again – they are beginning to pick up, I think.

“At this stage we have played 10 games: it is points on the board rather than position that counts and I’m very, very pleased considering we got off to the most awful start [losing to Wigan] on the first day of the season.”

• Guardian Service