We’re worried, okay? We’re worried that we might be about to embark upon the dreariest and dullest interlull of all time.
It is, frankly, a perfect storm of interlull dullness, as you can see from our quick Interlull Dullness Survey here.
Is it the November international break, the third in quick succession and thus by definition always the hardest to drag yourself through? Yes.
Are England’s games entirely meaningless? You bet your Anglo-centric arse and anus England’s games are entirely meaningless.
Are any big clubs currently in the very deepest depths of crisis and/or plausibly about to sack their manager? They are not.
Have the press already gleefully signalled their intention to make this The Bellingham Interlull at all costs and in all circumstances no matter what happens? Yes, with massive great knobs on.
It’s going to be just awful. There is probably nothing that can be done to save it or us, but here are five things that we desperately now want to happen over the days ahead in the forlorn hope it might at least mitigate the barrenness of the wasteland stretching out before us.
Tottenham losing to Man United
Famously something that Tottenham don’t really do anymore, their four wins against Manchester United last season even going so far as the truly absurd lengths of delivering a trophy to N17, but a lot has changed in the weeks and months since That Night in Bilbao.
Man United’s recovery from deepest and darkest crisis still hasn’t been enough to get that lad a haircut after the 2-2 draw at Forest, but it’s still delivered 10 points in four games and that will very much do. And Liverpool’s win over Villa last week has taken the edge off slightly at Anfield.
It’s going to be hard to concoct a full crisis for any of the Big Six now, but our best bet might be Thomas Frank over at Spurs after the most small-time ‘big club’ home performance in living memory against Chelsea. The initial plan appeared to be to play for a goalless draw and then, when that didn’t work out, play for a 1-0 defeat. It’s a mad plan for Spurs at home to absolutely anyone, but especially a Chelsea side that absolutely isn’t all that having lost to Sunderland the previous weekend and then nearly contrived all sorts of unpleasantness at desperate Wolves in the Carabao.
Frank absolutely needs a result and a performance against United to silence some of the increasingly loud doubts and also at least start to turn around that laughably poor home form, albeit only some of which – but an inevitably increasing amount – has come on his watch.
Lose to United for the first time in over three years, and Spurs will drop back into mid-table where, frankly, their performances deserve to have them. Do it in anything like a repeat of the drab, ambition-free nature of the Chelsea defeat and suddenly there’s a story to fill the void and an awkward couple of weeks for Frank before the blessed relief of another away game. Which is at Arsenal. Oof.
Man City beating Liverpool, heavily if possible
Not sure City can be plunged easily back into crisis, but we’re damn sure Liverpool can. Nothing about the way a team that has conceded 14 goals already in the Premier League this season has gone about their defending suggests they are in any way ready to cope with Erling Haaland in his current preposterous pomp, so there really is every chance for a silly high-scoring game here that does much to sustain us through the days and nights that follow.
Is a wild 5-3 in the last Premier League game for 13 days really too much to ask? We say no. No it is not. More defensive calamity. More Virgil van Dijk looking daggers at Milos Kerkez and wondering how it’s all come to this. More Haaland doing the robot.
While we’re being greedy, we’ll take a Salah hat-trick at the other end as well, please. We just want a Super Sunday headliner that legitimately has enough going on to fill the next three days’ discourse. We won’t ask for anything ever again. Not until March anyway.
We will grudgingly accept the reverse outcome – as we would with Spurs-United, to be fair – if it’s large and compelling and above all funny enough. But it really does feel like Spurs and Liverpool are our best crisis bets this weekend, the sheer futility of trying to predict what Chelsea might get up to having now been firmly established.
READ: Arsenal top, Wolves bottom, Liverpool being sh*t and other inevitable things we should have seen coming
Arsenal coming unstuck at Sunderland
Perhaps the greediest and unlikeliest request of the lot, but the less ridiculously we are able to spend the interlull kidding ourselves on that there might still be a title race, the better.
It’s another factor, really, in why City beating Liverpool is better than the other way round, because City are currently that precious one point closer to the runaway leaders, which means any result other than a City win just means that Arsenal lead getting bigger again.
Unless, and hear us out because it is technically possible, Arsenal don’t beat Sunderland. These lads are fourth in the league, after all. We really shouldn’t just be assuming Arsenal definitely beat them, even though assuming Arsenal definitely beat pretty much anyone feels entirely fair at this point what with the twin superpowers of never facing any shots on their own goal and always scoring at least one p*ss-boiling set-piece at the other.
But maybe the chaotic and unexpected energy of Sunderland is just the thing to derail the serene Mikel Arteta machine. And for our own something-to-fill-the-void requirements, the greater the prominence of Granit Xhaka in any such spanner-in-the-works behaviour the better.
Someone, anyone, losing heavily in a six-pointer
The fixture computer has deigned in her infinite wisdom and great mischievous magnificence to grant us not just two Big Six encounters upon this sacred final weekend before another bastard break, but also at least two relegation six-pointers. We thank her and make offerings to her glory.
You can chuck in Everton v Fulham if you want to make mischief, but it’s unlikely that anything there can really shift the needle enough. The big ones are West Ham v Burnley on Saturday afternoon, and Nottingham Forest v Leeds on Sunday.
We don’t care who steps up to heroically take the fall, we just need one of you four to get absolutely battered to keep the Sack Race nice and lively for the next 10 days. Please and thank you.
Thomas Tuchel picking Jude Bellingham
We’ve thought long and hard about this one. In truth, there is absolutely no universe now where this international break isn’t Bellingham Week. No timeline where Mediawatch isn’t sighing and repeating itself from the last international break, which was literally five f*cking minutes ago.
There’s no avoiding it, all we can hope to do is to mitigate the extent of the nonsense. And we reckon the best chance is if Tuchel does pick him this time.
Because if Bellingham is in the squad, at least the Bellingham Week stories that follow will have to make some kind of superficial nod to real-world events that actually happen rather than the press pack having completely free rein to just make up the narrative.
Which brings us to the further mitigating requirements required here to try and damp down the crazy. First, Bellingham will need to play some part in the games and be quite good but not too good. If he’s conspicuously good or conspicuously bad, it’s all too easy for it to naturally become the dominant narrative anyway. Bellingham isn’t really a footballer who does ‘quietly effective’ but we are really going to need him to try.
And if that can happen with the barest minimum of any accompanying behaviour that can be spun as Billy Big Bollocks antics, again it would really help.
Obviously, there’s no actual proper solution here. Anything he does (or doesn’t do) will still constitute a display of true colours or the speaking of volumes but the more egregiously the media has to reach for it the better. Don’t be giving them any ammunition.