SETANTA pundit Craig Burley surveyed the striker-less Everton team sheet and concluded that it was “pretty much a nightmare.”

But it was Chelsea who suffered the real Nightmare Before Christmas. And Tim Burton couldn’t have dreamt up the fantasy land Everton found themselves in last night.

One from which Chelsea captain John Terry engineered his own departure just 35 minutes in. Joe Cole and Nicolas Anelka soon followed for tactical reasons.

Three of Chelsea’s biggest influences removed from the park. The rest of them were played off it.

The only thing missing was, of course, the victory. And it says much about the way Everton once again defied their dwindling resources that they finished the evening gutted not to have achieved it.

You would have thought holding a side looking for their 12th successive away win in the league would have been satisfactory in the circumstances, even if it means Liverpool spend Christmas Day on top.

But in doing so, they showed their Merseyside rivals exactly how to take the game to 10 men in the way they failed to do at Arsenal a day earlier.

And they deserved so much more than to emerge from it with that pitiful single victory still in the ‘home wins’ column.

How harsh the sending-off of Terry was is open to debate, especially in the ever-changing climate of what referees tolerate.

But what is indisputable is that Everton already had a strong foothold in the game by then.

When it was 11 against 11, the fizzing one-touch passing seemed a little ambitious. But with Terry’s dismissal forcing John Obi Mikel to leave a gap in midfield, Everton set out to exploit it.