2 weeks Ago
The FA Cup finalists and Premier League champions will (almost certainly) be confirmed this weekend, and if that’s somehow not enough then how about a Clasico in the Copa del Rey final? It’s a Big Weekend all right. Games to watch: FA Cup semi-finals We’re cheating and putting them both in here because you can’t really have one without the other, can you? And they’re both pretty interesting semi-finals anyway, with narrative out the wazoo. Three of the four remaining FA Cup winners would be enormously interesting, ending trophy droughts that are embarrassingly long in two cases and in Crystal Palace’s case, delivering a first ever major title and at long, long last knocking the 1990/91 Zenith Data Systems Cup off its f*cking perch.
The other, and let’s be entirely honest about this, overwhelmingly likely possibility is that Manchester City win it. Sorry if this offends, but we will be annoyed if/when Man City do that. This is the season where trophy droughts end, not one where City still get to win one despite themselves.
We’ve already had Newcastle win their first trophy that wasn’t in, well, black and white. Arsenal or PSG may well finally get their hands on the Champions League after so many fruitless attempts. Hell, even Spurs are technically still in with a chance of winning something even though we all know deep in our bones they will not in fact do that.
There is no wrong answer in Saturday’s semi-final, at least, in which either Villa or Palace will get the reward of a showpiece Wembley final for the enormous, transformative strides each have taken under their current quietly impressive managers. Villa have gone from relegation battlers a few short years ago to perennial Champions League contenders, while Palace have gone from relegation battlers to the very brink of becoming the first Palace team in Premier League history to reach 50 points . And that is to our mind even more impressive given the sheer weight of history.
But on Sunday we either get Man City stomping all over the chances of someone more interesting and unexpected winning the cup, or another instalment of p*ss-boiling, xG-confounding magnificence from Nuno Espirito Santo and his incredibly Tricky Champions League-bound Trees. We make no apology on this occasion for casting all pretence of objectivity aside and hoping for the latter. Team to watch: Liverpool And while City are desperately trying to avoid the unimaginable horror of a single trophyless season, their successors as Premier League champions will be being crowned a couple of hundred miles away and sparking Guard of Honour-geddon in the process .
Liverpool require but a single point at Anfield this weekend to mathematically rubber-stamp the long inevitable, and could hardly ask for a simpler task than doing so against a team that a) has come away empty handed from more away days this season than anyone who isn’t already relegated yet b) inexplicably has a European semi-final to think about four days later . A Spurs team operating at their normal background levels of banter might be one you could reasonably expect to do something funny here. An even halfway regular Spurs team would absolutely have a chance of going to Anfield and pointlessly winning, thus doing Arsenal a ‘favour’ a year after so pointedly not doing that when it actually mattered against Man City.
That would be very on-brand. A pointless but amusing gesture that does nothing to further their own cause being about the most Spurs thing imaginable. But this Spurs team has placed all its banter eggs as well as its football ones in the Europa League.
They will go meekly at Anfield, a ground at which they have not won since 2011 and where they were paddled 4-0 only a couple of months ago in a match that actually did matter, and Liverpool will officially be champions. And very obviously enormously deserving ones. We will then all have to be prepared for Discourse, we’re afraid.
Guard of Honour Discourse, something which absolutely nobody has given the tiniest of shiny sh*tes about when it was Man City receiving them. Premier League Overall Quality Discourse, which is clearly already rubbing some of a Liverpool persuasion the wrong way but really can only ever be a criticism of literally everyone else apart from the team trending towards a final points total in the low 90s and a winning margin well into double-figures. New Contract Discourse.
Transfer Window Discourse. Manager Discourse. Mischievous Was Klopp Actually Holding Them Back Discourse.
Player to watch: Tyler Fredricson A lone bright spot from Manchester United’s latest miserable Premier League afternoon against Wolves last week, the 20-year-old centre-back may well keep his place for Sunday’s trip to Bournemouth as Ruben Amorim tries to nurse his injury-hit team through another 90 minutes of Premier League irrelevance before getting back to what is apparently now the club’s primary role of absurd and relentless Thursday night nonsense in the Europa League. Fredricson looks set to line up again alongside Harry Maguire and Noussair Mazraoui in the absence of Matthijs de Ligt as United try to repair some small amount of damage against just one of the many, many teams to have humiliated them in the Premier League this year after Bournemouth’s 3-0 win at Old Trafford just before Christmas. That may be an easier task than might have been expected a few weeks ago, with Bournemouth’s European charge having all but ground to a halt on the back of a run of one win in seven league games in all, and five defeats in their last seven at home in all competitions since that 5-0 thrashing of Nottingham Forest.
Manager to watch: Enzo Maresca Time may be running out for any more managerial departures this season , but there are many managers whose prospects of surviving the summer hinge on what happens over the few remaining weeks of this campaign. There has been an unavoidably small-time air around Maresca for much of this season, something that has betrayed his total lack of previous experience at the level he now finds himself. From denying that Chelsea were ever in a title race even when they were above Arsenal and had won five games in a row, to pretending going out of the FA Cup was okay because it meant they could focus on the league and then immediately losing in the league to the team that had just knocked them out of the cup, to his latest attempt to convince himself that failing to reach the Champions League would also be okay because Chelsea have failed to qualify for it in the last couple of seasons anyway.
They sit now outside the top five ahead of a run-in that features three of that top five as well as a pair of awkward tests against a much-improved Everton and a Man United team that for all its other many, many faults has fairly consistently been able to rouse themselves to some kind of vaguely acceptable level when finding themselves face-to-face with the clubs that used to be their main rivals. It’s hard to see any real way Maresca’s attempt at a reverse-Pochettino of starting brilliantly and ending shambolically can be any more successful than that proved to be, and whatever he says failure to qualify for the Champions League from the position Chelsea were in, in a season with an extra place available and two of the fractured Big Six disappearing from the equation altogether would represent failure. The late win at Fulham last time out was huge, representing as it did a rare win over an actual competent football team.
We’d kind of wondered how precisely it was that Chelsea had remained in the Champions League picture despite so obviously being quite rubbish for several months now, and then realised that their most recent Premier League wins before that had been against Tottenham, Leicester, Southampton, West Ham and the January version of Wolves. Nothing is going to come that easily over the weeks ahead for a team and manager now playing catch-up, and in Maresca’s specific case this weekend against Everton doing so from the stands after a touchline ban for some over-enthusiasm in the wake of that late, late winner against the Cottagers. Football League game to watch: Coventry v Luton Sixth v 22nd is a Championship game that’s always likely to carry a fair bit of heft when it lands in the penultimate round of the regular season.
Defeats for both Coventry themselves and Bristol City last time out have kept the play-off race very much alive for your fast-finishing Millwalls and Blackburns. Even if Coventry should be fine with a three-point gap to seventh, they’d still like to get that nailed down here and also take the chance to hit those play-offs with a bit of momentum, because it’s in short supply at both Sheffield United and Sunderland. For Luton, things are somewhat more grave despite back-to-back wins in their fight to avoid back-to-back relegations.
Plenty of teams above them remain in peril, though, and nobody is yet doomed in marked contrast to the moribund survival fight up in the Premier League. European game to watch: Barcelona v Real Madrid Can’t say fairer than a Clasico final of the Copa del Rey, can you? It’s a game that suddenly carries even more weight than might have already been expected, offering as it does the last truly plausible route for Real Madrid to salvage something tangible from the season after they were so impressively dismantled in the Champions League by Arsenal. For Barcelona, it could very well represent the first leg of a hugely impressive treble.
They face Inter in the Champions League semi-finals and have full control of the title race in La Liga currently with a four-point lead over their stuttering rivals. They’ve also not lost a domestic game this year. Victory here would be unlikely to save Carlo Ancelotti’s Real Madrid career given his failures in the two competitions by which all Real Madrid managers are judged, relentlessly and remorselessly, every single season.
But it would still be something to show for a season of ultimate disappointment as he heads back into the job market and tries desperately to avoid accidentally becoming Spurs manager..
