The Champions League is back and there’s managerial intrigue all over the place as Roberto De Zerbi auditions for a big Premier League job against Arne Slot’s Liverpool, Thomas Frank stares down the barrel and Liam Rosenior takes charge of his first game in the competition.
Meanwhile, Inter away feels like a game for Kai Havertz and not Viktor Gyokeres, if indeed there’s such a thing as a game for Viktor Gyokeres.
Game to watch: Marseille v Liverpool
“Ideally it’s not 11 games unbeaten it’s 11 wins in a row,” Arne Slot said ahead of their clash with Burnley when asked if the run was a sign of improvement and greater stability after a harrowing few weeks of defeats. As the boos rang out at Anfield after Marcus Edwards’ equaliser Saturday we wondered if what is now a 12-game unbeaten run has ever been met with such apathy from a group of supporters.
The concern for many of those fans – those who have now had enough of Slot – is that the turgid, cautious football now being played by Liverpool doesn’t allow for the sort of result required to put a nail in the Dutchman’s coffin.
A Champions League defeat of any sort would put hammer in hand with Liverpool currently out of the automatic qualification spots, but De Zerbi’s Marseille are capable of striking the telling blow on Wednesday.
With several top Premier League jobs set to shortly be going begging, De Zerbi will have extra motivation if it were needed to dole out a mega-win the likes of which Marseille have delivered on several occasions this season. They’ve hit opposition teams for five or more seven times.
READ: Van Dijk is wrong over biggest problem Liverpool ‘have to address again apparently’ in ‘debrief’
Team to watch: Chelsea
Liam Rosenior has very quickly been cast as a David Brent-ian figure of fun owing to his middle-management away-day tropes, and we’re all thoroughly looking forward to The Athletic long-read detailing his use of kitchen utensils as tools in analogies and quotes from buxom country singers as motivation, but it is also worth considering how far he’s come in such a short space of time as he prepares for his first Champions League game. Credit is as due as the withering putdowns on the basis of his grating personality.
There’s a lot of good fortune in his appointment. Chelsea are the only club of their size and standing that would hand such an opportunity to a guy of Liam Rosenior’s level of experience and he would not have got the job had he not been managing sister club Strasbourg.
But he’s “worked his whole life for this” and if we allow ourselves to put cynicism for a moment it’s undeniably great to see a young English coach of Sierra Leonean descent who had a decent but not outstanding playing career now managing Chelsea at the very highest level, albeit vs Pafos at home first up.
It is possible to root for someone you don’t want to share a pint with.
Team to watch: Tottenham
The solace that the Champions League has provided for Thomas Frank at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is one of the great quirks of the season. While only West Ham (7) and Wolves (5) have won fewer points at home than Spurs (9) in the Premier League, Frank’s side have won all three of their Champions League games on home turf, scoring eight goals and conceding none.
Villarreal, Copenhagen and Slavia Prague is as gentle a run of opponents as he could have hoped for mind, and Borussia Dortmund – second in the Bundesliga and level on 11 points with Spurs just outside the automatic spots – aren’t the next patsy Frank needs to save his job.
David Ornstein reckons “it’s a matter of when, not if, he will go” and the “when” will surely be Tuesday around 10pm should Spurs not get a result against the Bundesliga side. When the players believe a manager is “out of his depth” there’s only ever one outcome.
Player to watch: Kai Havertz
Surely. He’s been fit, if not match fit, for the last six games and has made just two substitute appearances totalling 29 minutes against Portsmouth in the FA Cup and Chelsea in the League Cup semi-final. Arsenal’s forwards have been pants in most of those games; no one more pants than Viktor Gyokeres.
Even if the £64m striker was flying rather than delivering the bumbling reality, Gyokeres need not play against Inter on Wednesday. Arsenal are three points clear at the top of the table. If anything, the Swede looks as though he could do with a night off to sulk, scream into the night or however else he exhibits his utter misery.
The danger for him is that the return of Havertz will also see the return of Arsenal’s attacking fluency and consign Gyokeres to the bench for the foreseeable. There’s more than a fair chance of that happening as the best football Arsenal have played this season – against Tottenham and then Bayern Munich in November – came when The Proper Striker They’ve Always Needed was out injured.
EFL game to watch: Coventry v Millwall
Frank Lampard’s side were running away with the Championship at the end of November but their lead at the top of the table has been cut to six points after just three wins in their last nine games and Millwall in fourth are just nine points behind Coventry ahead of their meeting at the CBS arena on Tuesday.
A win for Lampard would ease the nerves of his young side, who are now playing with The Fear that was absent in the first few months of the campaign. Millwall meanwhile will believe they have a genuine chance of automatic promotion should they come away with all three points.