Roll up, roll up, there’s another unmissable episode of the Tottenham Clown Car Rodeo this weekend. And this one’s against Liverpool, so you know it’s good.
Game to watch: Tottenham v Liverpool
Because honestly, why on earth would anyone not watch this match? We’ve racked our brains for about seven hours and so far come up with only one halfway plausible, valid reason why you might not want to watch this match: you are a Spurs fan.
For everyone else, there really is no excuse to be missing this one. The visitors are Liverpool. They’re the best team in the country right now. Fine, well done, that’s very clever and impressive of you. But with all due respect, this isn’t about you.
Sure, Liverpool might have toyed with a bit of vulnerability in recent draws with Newcastle and Fulham, but fundamentally we know what we can expect from them. They will play well, and Mo Salah will probably score at least one goal. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s carried them a long way this season already and will probably take them much further still.
But Liverpool really are only of secondary interest here because the main question is what will playing the best and most consistent team in the country cause Spurs to do? That’s what counts. And the brilliant thing is that there are infinite possible answers to that question, and absolutely all of them are magnificent.
Let’s have a look at Spurs’ recent form, shall we? Within their last four games, they’ve lost 4-3 from 2-0 up, tried to lose from 3-0 up but accidentally won 4-3, gone 5-0 up before half-time, and most absurdly of all very nearly lost a football match to a team from Scotland of all places.
And it’s not like they were sensible before that. At no other club does a manager have to add the caveat ‘as long as we win’ when declaring himself happy with his team scoring four or five goals every game.
What did inevitably get lost in the sheer scale of the Carabao nonsense on display against United is just how many players Spurs are missing. They were without 10 first-teamers; even allowing for United’s own brand of clusterf*ckery, it’s fair to say that finding a way to beat a big club in a big game with that many key players missing would normally be enormously praiseworthy. It’s massive credit to Spurs’ relentless commitment to the brand that they managed to find a way to do it that was not in the end enormously praiseworthy.
But now they’re going to have to try and do it all again against a far less silly big team. None of those missing players appear likely to return at the weekend, meaning that we should all get the chance to see Salah and co. taking on a defence whose only remotely composed and reassuring presence is an 18-year-old midfielder playing entirely out of position who a few weeks ago had never even started a Premier League game.
Logically, Liverpool should win this game handily. But logic has long since left the building at Spurs. Absolutely anything can and will happen in a game that absolutely does not need any extra spice but has it anyway by virtue of also marking Liverpool’s long awaited return to the scene of last season’s most controversial game.
Manager to watch: Pep Guardiola
If we were picking a ground to visit with the goal of avoiding slipping to a record of one win in 12 games, there would probably be a good few higher on the list than dragging our weary squad and great big overheating manager’s brain to Villa Park.
Pep and his formerly champion team have had a rare midweek off, thanks to the Carabao defeat at Spurs that kicked off their current run. Maybe it will have done some good. Maybe it will have cleared some heads.
Time to think, time to breathe, is rare at this time of year. One of the striking things about the one win in 11 is the fact it only took six-and-a-half weeks to rack up those 11 games and there was an international break in the middle of it as well.
City are not alone there, of course. Ruben Amorim only took charge of his first Man United game on November 24 and has already delivered eight baffling and wildly varying results.
It can go two ways, a break. It can be good to get straight back into another game after a disappointment like the derby rather than spend a week stewing. But we do rather think that in City’s case the players and managers both needed it. They may have been able to relocate and reattach their heads in that time. Games coming thick and fast certainly wasn’t helping them change anything up to now, so this is at least different.
The United game was really the first time we’ve given serious credence to the idea that Guardiola might be on the way out at City. He’s not going to get sacked – you can pack that talk in, show some respect – but his head is clearly scrambled. He looks exhausted and sounds spent. He’s never experienced anything like this and is clearly struggling with it. The fact it feels possible that a man who only signed a contract a few weeks ago might now walk away tells its own story, but the timing of that new contract was never one that suggested clear planning and careful thought.
It always looked like a fairly desperate ploy to force order upon the chaos from outside. And it hasn’t worked. City now have to get back to winning ways here and it won’t be straightforward.
Villa, for their part, have had their own week off to ruminate on a costly late collapse of their own against Forest. It’s rare to be coming in to a game against Pep’s City as the form side on the back of three wins in 12 games, but these are unusual times.
READ NEXT: Guardiola resignation would follow transfer walkouts, Keane fury and broken Spurs ‘promises’
Team to watch: Southampton
The list of managers on Southampton’s apparent wish-list doesn’t suggest they’re going to follow standard practice and respond to the failure of a manager by appointing his direct antithesis to follow. The guys they seem to be looking at are all progressive, possession types a la Russell Martin, although perhaps the idea is that they might be slightly more willing to do what they think is best for Southampton rather than what they think might get them the Bayern Munich job in a year’s time.
In the meantime, though, it’s Simon Rusk in charge at St Mary’s and it will be interesting to see how he sets his side up at Fulham. Ideal fixture in a lot of ways, against a very good and capable team perfectly capable of exploiting any continued commitment to abject nonsenseball from the Saints, but not one so formidable that a caretaker-manager bounce can be entirely ruled out.
At the very least, we’d like to see Southampton manage to touch the ball before going 1-0 down in this one. We believe in you!
Player to watch: Kai Havertz
While Gabriel Jesus’ Carabao hat-trick against Crystal Palace was lovely for him and lovely for Arsenal and really lovely for anyone looking to craft banters based on Marc Guehi’s armband daubings, it might not have been particularly great news for Kai Havertz.
When you are the nominal striker for a team that has now taken the failure to score goals from open play in the league to near sarcastic levels, it may be considered sub-optimal to sit and watch someone come into the side and immediately score three goals.
Sure, it was the Carabao, a competition which isn’t real and can’t hurt you, but nevertheless. Havertz could do with a performance and if we’re being particularly greedy even maybe a goal as Arsenal take on the opponents they faced for that knockabout, midweek laugh under altogether more serious conditions.
Football League game to watch: Sheffield Wednesday v Stoke
In theory, a game in which the Owls bid to close the five-point gap between themselves and the play-off places against a freefalling Stoke team without a win in seven. In reality, a match that will be dominated by discussion of Wednesday boss Danny Rohl and whether he will even be at Hillsborough for any prospective promotion push.
He’s certainly engineered quite a turnaround at a team seemingly only previously likely to head out of the Championship at the other end, and that’s got him firmly on the radar for the Southampton job.
You do kind of feel like he’d be a fool to take it, but a shot at the Premier League – however brief and doomed – has turned older and wiser heads before. The fact Rohl has previously spent time at Southampton in the Ralph Hasenhuttl days adds another layer of heart-over-head possibility.
European game to watch: Barcelona v Atletico Madrid
A huge game ahead of La Liga’s winter break with top spot on the line as stumbling leaders Barcelona run into an Atletico Madrid side doing what they always seem to do whenever Spain’s big two display any kind of frailty.
It’s 11 straight wins in all competitions now for Diego Simeone’s mischief makers, a run that has coincided with Barcelona picking up just one win in six league games to really open up what had threatened to be a non-starter of a title race.
Just to add an extra layer of frankly unnecessary intrigue to this top-of-the-table clash, an eminently feasible draw between these two would offer Real Madrid the chance to pinch top spot for themselves with victory over Sevilla the following day.