It’s a fun-looking slate of Premier League fixtures this weekend, with a healthy selection of game offering the potential for the So-Called Big Six sides to have their noses bloodied further.
That’s especially true at Anfield, where title-chasing Brighton must surely have never fancied their chances more than they do this weekend.
There’s also a couple of far more predictable games where knowing exactly what will happen can all be part of the fun if that’s your kind of thing. Chelsea v Spurs, for instance, a game for which we’ve already written the whole of 16 Conclusions in advance.
Game to watch: Liverpool v Brighton
No surprise that this game pits one side scoring goals by the bucketload in what looks like a hugely promising title tilt against another with reasonable hopes of competing for the European spots again, with a following wind.
Perhaps a slight surprise which way round those two clubs are, but never mind that.
What shouldn’t be a surprise in this one is how entertaining it should be. Brighton have already plundered 23 goals in just seven Premier League games this season, and anything like the defensive effort we saw from Liverpool against Villarreal in the week should see the Seagulls in business again.
But a Liverpool side that eventually pulled its finger out to score four and avoid embarrassment may find it slightly harder to extract themselves from any self-inflicted unpleasantness this time around.
If Brighton can get a result here, and we really do like their chances of doing so, then there will be no avoiding their richly deserved elevation to They Couldn’t, Could They? status.
Team to watch: Tottenham
There’s already been a lot going on in Tottenham’s season. There was plenty of it just on Monday night. Their first win of the season came from what was probably their worst overall performance since the opening-day atrocity at Brentford.
Securing any kind of win against a clearly fast-improving Coventry side shouldn’t be downplayed given how desperate Spurs’ situation was becoming and how self-perpetuating their ability to slump into lengthy doldrums-based spells without victory is.
But it was a curious night. There was the obvious buzz provided by the return to James Maddison to the starting line-up and even more so for Dejan Kulusevski making any kind of appearance in a Spurs shirt. It had, absurdly, been over 500 days since either of those things had happened.
Yet there was also a distinct lack of conviction to Spurs’ play. Despite getting themselves three goals, all were from long range and, in truth, two could and should have been saved. They never once really got in behind Coventry. For all that Maddison’s neat and incisive football and Mohammed Kudus’ running and Omar Marmoush’s persistence were welcome sights, Spurs were still deeply ponderous in most of what they did, culminating in the series of dozy errors that led to Coventry’s equalising goal.
And now, because Spurs aren’t allowed nice things, instead of getting the chance to parlay their first win in to some kind of momentum-building run that lifts them up the table to anything like an area where a team with their outlay ought to be, they must instead go to Stamford Bridge. The ground where Spurs’ dreams historically go to die.
Even in the good times for Spurs, they were seldom to be found on a ground where they have recorded precisely one Premier League victory. To put that in perspective, that’s even fewer than this year’s tallies of Spurs Premier League wins at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium this year.
Their matchwinner that day was Dele. The last man before him to score a winning goal for Spurs on this ground was Gary Lineker.
In fairness, Spurs do sometimes draw here, but even then it’s often in a season-ending flurry of headloss and despair.
Manager to watch: Michael Carrick
It’s very clearly now ‘when’ not ‘if’ for Michael Carrick, a man whose beleaguering has grown more complete through the season so far and must now take on a Bournemouth side that has just done to Milan what Como did to Carrick’s United.
It was always a strong possibility that Carrick would flounder as permanent United manager, given how thin his CV really is, and this was the gamble United took. Not in the summer when he had made his case pretty much unanswerable, but in giving him the chance to create that scenario with an easy-mode second half of the 25/26 season where he was given perfect conditions in which to thrive.
You sensed a reluctance from United in the summer, a fear that they knew they were going down a familiar road and knew how that story would end but they’d left themselves no choice. Yet nobody could have thought it would be ending this soon, unravelling quite so utterly and quite so fast.
The 4-1 defeat at Como was abject. A complete surrender from which there is no coming back. And yet here Carrick still is, still just about in the job. Still a chance for the poor bastard to demonstrate that Como was only the worst game of his Man United managerial career so far.
For Carrick, who is not a stupid man and will know his days are clearly numbered, his continued employment starts to look like something close to a humiliation ritual. There is no way back for him now, and in the slightly longer term nor does there appear to be so for a great many of his wastrel players.
Where the United Brains Trust go next is anyone’s guess, but you can be fairly confident they’ll get it wrong and even if they don’t that it will all still go to sh*t anyway before another one of Fergie’s boys gets brought in to solve everything with pure Knows The Club energy. What’s Wes Brown up to these days?
As some wag put it in the Mailbox, the best solution might be to sack Carrick and then appoint him interim manager.
It’s a good gag, and reminder that however flawed and however out of his depth and however obviously not the solution to any of United’s myriad problems Carrick may be, he’s not the cause of them either.
Player to watch: Phil Foden
All Manchester City players currently occupy a curious place in the wider footballing consciousness, their futures suddenly unknown and unclear. But in most predictions of What Happens Next For City’s Superstars in the event of City being relegated or expelled or fired into the sun, Foden occupies a specific and vital position as The Superstar Who Stays.
Even if City weren’t the elephant in the Premier League room, Foden’s career is one that would be at a crossroads anyway. And whatever combination of factors are currently provoking his response, it’s been a good one.
Sure, bringing an inflatable banana to a post-match interview to prove how unrattled you are does look a little bit like something a very rattled person might do, but scoring four goals in two games, including a Champions League hat-trick, is an undeniably impressive retort to all the swirling unpleasantness.
And Foden’s deep City roots leave him ever so slightly less vulnerable to the absurd complaints of His Majesty’s Press Corps, who took Man City daring to celebrate – and even to play – against Liverpool the other week as a gross breach of acceptable etiquette.
He might just be the perfect player for City’s uncertain future, and an anchor for their turbulent present.
Or it might just be a coincidental purple patch from a very rattled inflatable banana owner. Impossible to be sure, but we’ll perhaps know more after the weekend’s clash with Aston Villa. They’re not quite Liverpool, but they’d certainly rank pretty high on the list of those to have lost the most from City’s shenanigans.
Football League game to watch: Charlton v Norwich
While Ipswich go toe to toe with the great and the good of the Premier League, their East Anglian rivals Norwich exist now as a warning about how yo-yo clubs generally end up. Not for the first time since the energy of their yo-yo years evaporated, their likeliest route back out of the Championship looks like being through the trapdoor.
A run of five straight league defeats has sent them tumbling all the way down to 21st, sandwiched between Watford and Burnley, who also know the feeling.
A few places above those familiar old Barclays names sit Charlton, whose own five-match winless run does at least feature a draw here and there but who would very much like to avoid getting sucked down into the Former Yo-Yo Club Pit of Despair having spent far too long in its clammy environs themselves down the years.
European game to watch: Barcelona v Real Madrid
The first Clasico since Jose Mourinho’s return to Madrid was always going to have a bit of something extra, but it’s one that now carries a keen sense of urgency for his side.
You feel that Madrid must at the very, very least halt a freewheeling, freescoring Barca’s flawless domestic start to the season. And probably more than that.
Should Real lose, it may even at this early stage be fatal to the title race. A perfect 10 start for Barcelona would give them a nine-point lead over Real and at least a five-point cushion over Atletico Madrid.
Still, at least if it does end badly for Real we can at least rely on Mourinho accepting that outcome with his customary quiet dignity.
