RECENT results have shown Everton are capable of competing with the Premier League’s best. Now David Moyes has challenged his players to start beating them.

The Goodison outfit entertain Arsenal this evening infused by the confidence of their performances against Liverpool during the past 10 days.

It further underlined Everton’s growing success against the so-called ‘big four’ this season, with points having already been taken off title challengers Chelsea and Manchester United.

However, Moyes’s men have not beaten one of the five teams above them in any competition since Andrew Johnson thrashed home an injury-time winner in a Goodison blizzard against Arsenal in March 2007.

That is a run of 22 games without victory against the supposed cream of the Premier League, a shortcoming Moyes is eager for his team to address when they aim to move within two points of their fifth-placed opponents tonight.

“Recently we’ve drawn with Chelsea and the draw with Manchester United prior to that, we’ve now drawn with Liverpool twice; the next bit is now to try and beat them,” says Moyes. “So that’s what we’ll try and do in the Arsenal game.

“The game gives us an opportunity. We’re at home and hopefully the crowd behind us can help us.

“We have to keep that gap in sixth and I’ve always said at worse that we want to finish sixth. But if we can get a wee bit of momentum, and a team ahead of us loses their way, then we have to look to see if we can catch them. That has to be the goal.”

Everton have won three of their six home league meetings with Arsenal during Moyes’s tenure, and were the victims of a harsh 4-1 scoreline in the fixture last season.

But the Gunners scored an emphatic 3-1 triumph at the Emirates in October, and the Goodison manager says: “Arsenal are the closest to us and if we can get a result against them then it tightens the gap up between us. This game is important to us.

“We’ve had a good record at home against Arsenal in recent years. The players are playing with a lot of confidence and our Goodison form has started to turn in our favour.

“But we’re still a long way away from Arsenal. Over the years, they’ve put a lot of foundations down, with the money they generate from their new stadium and things like that. They have a conveyor belt of youngsters coming through, so they’ve done a lot of good things.”