After a brief Carabao interlude, it’s right back to the real business.
That’s right, it’s the magnificently chaotic 2025/26 Premier League season and its absolute panic about set-piece goals.
Tottenham and Chelsea can generally be relied upon to serve up something quite mad even in seasons when they are not two of the more chaotic teams in a chaotic league, so their clash on Saturday evening should have something for everyone, while there’s also the latest instalment of the funtime Liverpool crisis variety hour and loads of other good stuff in the various games that won’t be won 1-0 by Arsenal scoring from a corner.
Enjoy.
Game to watch: Tottenham v Chelsea
There is perhaps no better fixture at this time than Tottenham v Chelsea to sum up where this Premier League season is headed. No fixture that better highlights and emphasises the absolute uncertainty.
The question we ask you is this: are either of these teams any good? We’ve no idea, and we don’t think anyone out there can convince us that they do have a clear idea either way about either of them.
And what’s absolutely crucial to note here is that even after this match is over, and no matter what has happened in it, we will still be none the wiser about the relative merits of these teams, either of which could conceivably finish cosily in the top four this season or about ninth. Or worse. Who knows?
What Spurs do have, based on this season and going back deep into last, is spectacularly awful Premier League home form.
Since back-to-back 4-1 wins over West Ham and Aston Villa around this time last year, Spurs have played 18 home games in the league and won just three, with four draws and a genuinely ludicrous 11 defeats.
The meagre 13 points they have managed to collect in almost an entire year’s worth of home action is already matched by the points they’ve picked up in five away games this season.
That at least gives Spurs some consistency to their inconsistency; Chelsea are just impossible to predict from one match to another. Crushing West Ham and Nottingham Forest here, succumbing to an unbelievably stupid defeat to Manchester United in their crisis days there. Outplaying and outsmarting Liverpool, and then losing their very next Premier League home game to Sunderland.
Manager to watch: Arne Slot
Five months after delivering the title to Anfield and six weeks after a five-match winning run to start the season, Arne Slot is under the most severe pressure imaginable and now a genuine contender in the Sack Race.
It’s a remarkable turn of events and after the genuine insanity that has greeted a reserve team losing to Crystal Palace in the Carabao – an event likened in genuine seriousness by one seasoned journalist to the infamous time Brendan Rodgers sacked off a Champions League game at the f*cking Bernabeu – we do wonder just how batsh*t the response might be should Liverpool fail to get the better of a Villa team that has now won four straight league games, including the last two against Spurs and City sides that sit above Liverpool in the table.
Liverpool’s crisis is real and deep, but it might also help if Slot himself didn’t keep responding to his team’s travails in the most ludicrous manner. He has said some things over the last few weeks that would make Jurgen Klopp or Arsene Wenger blush.
We get the ‘show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser’ idea of just hating to lose, but there is some deeply worrying stuff coming out of Slot’s mouth these days: Man United with their nefarious team selection; everyone basically cheating by kicking the ball in the air (as long as you ignore the times Liverpool have been beaten by teams not doing that perfectly valid thing); and now, after a summer spend of nearly half a billion pounds, a little whinge about the depth of his squad compared to others after the defeat to Palace.
Really does feel like he’s now just one setback away from complaining about the roundness of the balls.
Team to watch: West Ham
Next week’s game against Burnley before the international break is perhaps an even bigger one for Nuno and West Ham, but this is not a club any longer in position to pick and choose where its points might come from.
If Sunday’s game against Newcastle gets too grizzly, there’s a non-zero chance Nuno doesn’t even make it to the Burnley game anyway.
Nuno is facing the very real prospect of a second sacking this season and, while there’s a compelling argument he’s more victim than cause of the malaise gripping both Forest and West Ham it’s particularly hard with regards to his latest appointment to come up with any compelling argument that he offers any worthwhile solutions.
The Hammers are yet to pick up a single point at home this season under either Graham Potter or Nuno, but Newcastle at least offer a change of pace. Those four straight defeats have all been in London derbies, against Chelsea, Tottenham, Crystal Palace and Brentford.
It’s not much for West Ham to cling to as they desperately try to escape the consequences of years of mounting complacency and hubris, but there’s not much else is there?
Player to watch: Erling Haaland
It’s been slightly lost in the whole Liverpool hoopla that’s dominating the agenda at this time, with what little bandwidth there is left over after that currently devoted entirely to whether Arsenal’s set-piece goals are melting the ice caps, but Erling Haaland is currently languishing in a dismal and barren one-game goal drought.
Can the big Norwegian lift himself from these struggles and get back among the goals and City’s campaign back on track?
Glib smart-arsery aside, there is a serious point here. We’ve very little time for the current set-piece moral panic because a) goals are goals and b) really fast and flat long throws are great fun and if anything there should be more of them.
But while the pearl-clutching debate over the morality of set-piece goals is the worst kind of guff, there is a fairer point to be made in questioning the sustainability and viability of any team whose goals are largely gathered from a narrow range of methods. It doesn’t matter what type of goal you’re talking about; it’s generally going to be a good idea to have as many types in your, ahem, arsenal as possible.
And here is City’s current problem. Nobody is more reliant on a particular type of goal than City this season. And that type of goal is ‘Erling Haaland goal’. He’s scored 11 of City’s 17 Premier League goals. Maxime Esteve has scored more goals for them this season than any other City player.
Only five City players have scored a Premier League goal this season. By contrast, Spurs, who also have 17 Premier League goals, have nine different contributors.
Most significantly, in the two games where Haaland has been kept out – against Spurs and Villa – City have managed not a single goal or point.
Stop Haaland, Stop City is probably still a bit reductive. But it’s closer to the case than any other player-club combination at this time.
Football League game to watch: Norwich v Hull
The problem with being a yo-yo club is that gravity exists. Norwich are not the only club currently finding that out, sitting as they do in a Championship bottom five also featuring recent Barclays-Sky Bet flitterers Sheffield United and Southampton, but they are the one of that trio for whom the present appears bleakest having lost five games in a row under a manager in Liam Manning who appears to be quite violently out of his depth.
The Canaries are without a win in any competition since August and face a huge week before the international break, starting with Saturday lunchtime’s clash with Hull – a club that also knows a thing about how yo-yo behaviour can turn out – before a midweek trip to the only club currently below them in the Championship table.
European game to watch: Bayern Munich v Bayer Leverkusen
If only to see whether a) Harry Kane can score even more goals and b) Bayern Munich can extend their winning start to the season to nine games in the Bundesliga and 15 in all competitions.
Women’s Super League game to watch: Chelsea v London City Lionesses
You can’t move for London derbies in this season’s Super League, but this one at least has novelty. The big-spending Lionesses are doing things differently as a standalone club following their 2019 breakaway from Millwall, and after a tough start to life in the WSL are finding their feet.
Coping with Chelsea is, obviously, a different matter altogether with the perennial champions once again looking down on the rest after five wins and a draw from their first six games of the campaign.