LEIGHTON BAINES admits Everton cannot afford to continue dropping home points if they are to force their way back into the Premier League’s top five.

David Moyes’s side were reliant on a late Diniyar Bilyaletdinov goal to earn a point at home to promoted Wolverhampton Wanderers on Saturday.

Kevin Doyle had struck in the 76th minute for the visitors, who ended the game with 10 men after the injury-time dismissal of substitute Stefan Maierhofer for a second bookable offence.

It was the second successive home draw for Everton, who were held to a similar scoreline against Stoke City a fortnight earlier.

And Baines said: “There’s no escaping the fact that these are the type of games we need to be winning if we want to be back in the top five this season. The only way we can make up for this now is to go and take some points off the top teams.

“Especially at home, we have got to be winning these type of games. We’re dropping points at home against sides where you wouldn’t expect us to.

“But we like to think we always show character, we will always be in a game and we will always fight.

“Even if all of our normal qualities aren’t there, we’ll have that character trait and won’t give up on the game. We showed that against Wolves and it got us a point when otherwise we might have got nothing.”

Baines added: “We didn’t expect it to be easy. It’s always going to be tough in a Premier League game. But we expect to win our home games and we’re very disappointed. We struggled a bit in the first half, we couldn’t get any rhythm going or progression to our play. The first half was flat. We just seemed to be pumping long balls forward and there was no real thought to our play.

“But we looked better in the second half, we looked a little more like ourselves.”

Everton began the game with Louis Saha as a lone striker, but were much more threatening after the interval once Yakubu joined the Frenchman in attack.