Big Weekend: Arsenal v Man City, Liverpool, Ollie Watkins, Ruben Amorim
There are times when the title of this feature can seem bitterly ironic, but this weekend is not one of those weekends. This really is another Big Weekend on the back of last weekend, which was also very much a Big Weekend.
This Big Weekend is one that could quite conceivably end with either Arsenal or Man City or indeed both an uncomfortable distance adrift of Liverpool even at this early stage, while all eyes will once again be on Ruben Amorim and his weirdly admirable ongoing insistence on denying objective reality. It’s a tactic we might all like to consider in these troubled times. Much easier than the alternative.
And another Premier League weekend arrives with the really big question: will this finally be the game where Aston Villa score a goal?
What if they don’t score a goal, though? What if they just never score another Premier League goal ever again? What then? Is there a plan in place for that?
We don’t know.
Game to watch: Arsenal v Manchester City
Assuming, as assume now we surely must, that a day earlier Liverpool have scored a preposterous late winner in the Merseyside Derby, this becomes an uncomfortably hefty early game between what are very likely the only two teams capable of giving the champions a problem over the course of the whole season.
Neither would probably be choosing to play the other at the end of a weekend when the scoreboard pressure could be absolutely huge.
If Liverpool have beaten Everton, then the scenarios in play involve either both these teams being six points adrift already, or City slipping nine points off the early pace, or Arsenal being five off the running and City eight away.
It does very much feel like a game that might be most easily enjoyed by Liverpool fans basking in post-derby glow than either of the teams actually involved.
But even without the whole ‘bollocksing up the title race in mid-September’ hoopla, there is still much to commend this fixture.
That’s been true for a good few years now, since Arsenal managed to shake the habit of getting slapped silly every time City turned up.
And last year Mikel Arteta even managed to shake off his usual big-game timidity to hand out a fearful thrashing of their own, with all the wonderful ‘stay humble’ saltiness that followed.
Worth remembering also that that particular Arsenal statement of intent in the title race was followed by managing only one win from their next four games against Leicester, West Ham, Nottingham Forest and Manchester United.
There’s a draining emotional heft to this fixture that both teams could probably do without just as the real two-games-a-week business kicks in, and every chance that no matter what happens at the Emirates the real winners are to be found at Anfield.
Team to watch: Liverpool
Liverpool have played five proper competitive games of football this season. In three of those games they have eased themselves into a 2-0 lead, promptly p*ssed said 2-0 lead all up the wall, and then just gone and scored a ridiculous late winner anyway.
It’s a fantastic bit, and long may it continue. It’s so rare for the best team in the country to also be the most fun to watch, and we should all try to cherish it while it remains the case here.
The reason, most obviously, the best team is rarely the most fun is because the best team in the country is, almost by definition, unlikely to be one prone to repeated acts of nonsense. Liverpool certainly weren’t like this last season, and we much prefer this season’s approach as a neutral.
The best team in the country might be the most electric going forward, or the most reliably secure at the back, or even both. But rare indeed is the season where the best team look simultaneously so vulnerable yet so inevitable.
And with this newly impish, Jack Grealish-inspired Everton side looking far more capable than most Toffees of recent vintage of exploiting those Liverpool vulnerabilities we really could be in for a classic Merseyside derby.
Just don’t whatever you do miss the last few minutes.
Player to watch: Ollie Watkins
It’s now one goal in his last 11 Aston Villa appearances for a striker Villa desperately need to start firing and soon.
Sunderland away wouldn’t have been a fixture that filled Villa fans with dread when the fixture computer spat out its findings back in June, but a lot has changed since then. The Black Cats have two wins from two at home, and Villa need to find something soon to avoid this season spiralling into something truly unpleasant.
They are still, preposterously, yet to score a single league goal a month into the campaign, crashed out of the Carabao at the first attempt – although there was at least a goal in that one, so progress, we guess? – and from next week have the added workload of European engagement to consider.
It’s not that uncommon for a player to be in some need of the cliched one-to-go-in-off-his-backside at this stage of the season, and Watkins is very much there. But it’s something a bit different when a whole team is waiting for some buttock-based goalscoring good fortune to kick start an entire season.
We mustn’t be too dramatic. We’re not yet in a Fear For Them situation with Villa, we really aren’t. But if this weekend goes wrong then it’s going to get harder and harder to ignore the warning signs.
Manager to watch: Ruben Amorim
As he will be now pretty much every week until either a) he’s sacked, b) Manchester United become consistently and convincingly quite good on a semi-regular basis or c) the boiling seas rise and claim us all.
What’s really fun is that right now our money is firmly on c).
Last season, we’d have said that Chelsea at home wasn’t a bad fixture for an under-pressure United and their Beleaguered Manager. One of the quirks of last season was that United – before and after Amorim’s arrival – were very good at sorting out the dreadful relegated teams and perfectly capable of summoning up some kind of dormant muscle memory of their glorious past when faced with any of their former rivals.
They could be relied on to put up a decent show against your Liverpools, your Arsenals, your Man Citys and the Chelseas of this world as well as beating the very worst teams; it was the vast array of teams in the middle that United had problems with seemingly every single time.
But this season they have already celebrated a played-quite-well-actually cup when losing 1-0 to Arsenal and been thoroughly outplayed in the end by Manchester City in the derby.
We’re not yet quite sure about Chelsea this season, either, with an inconsistent start after their Club World Cup antics suggesting they might not quite be the title contenders we thought they could be.
They really should be able to sort out United, though, possessing as they do exactly the kind of game-controlling midfielders Amorim so conspicuously lacks and all manner of tricky, clever forwards capable of exploiting the ongoing confusion that reigns within a defensive structure where, if anything for me, Clive, United sometimes have too many players back with the result that nobody’s quite sure who’s supposed to be doing what.
We know by now that Amorim isn’t going to change. He will live by his back three and die by his back three, with the only question really just how overtly he will attempt to goad United into handing him that lovely £12m pay-off if/when it does all go wrong again against another team United used to consider a major rival really not that long ago.
Football League game to watch: Leicester v Coventry
Fourth meets sixth at the King Power in what already feels like a pretty significant early clash between two key promotion contenders, with Leicester yet to truly convince or stamp their obvious class on the division since dropping back into it.
Coventry, meanwhile, remain unbeaten yet have foolishly concentrated far too many of their division-leading 15 goals into two big daft wins when they could have been far more usefully spread around. Silly.
European game to watch: Lazio v Roma
You can’t say fairer than a lovely slice of Sunday lunchtime-ish Rome derby action to set you up for the big afternoon of Barclays to follow. Especially with both teams smarting ahead of this one after disappointing defeats last time out against Sassuolo and Torino.
In a just and right world it would be on Channel 4, of course, rather than so-called ‘DAZN’, but one can’t have everything.
Women’s Super League game to watch: Manchester United v Arsenal
Having pretty adroitly in the end avoided Champions League humiliation at the hands of Brann, Elisabeth Terland’s hat-trick helping them overcome a 1-0 first-leg deficit with a bit to spare, attention turns back to the WSL for United and the visit of Arsenal.
It’s a battle between two of the four teams still boasting 100 per cent records after two games of the new season, and one that might give us a few clues about which if either of these teams might have the best chance of ending Chelsea’s seemingly unstoppable reign of terror.
