This weekend’s chunky offering features the last significant game of Liverpool’s season and one that Arsenal would very much like to be the last significant game of their league season.
Game to watch: Liverpool v Newcastle
The first silverware of the English season is dished out on Sunday, and for much of the build-up it’s felt like Newcastle’s latest attempt to end a trophy drought that is so shockingly long it feels cruel to even mock it a tiny bit has been cursed, with injuries and suspensions taking a heavy toll.
But midweek could not have gone better for the Magpies. While they sat with their trotters up, they got the absolute dream scenario at Anfield: Liverpool put through 120 minutes of physical effort and stress, before the emotional damage of going out on penalties.
It’s not enough on its own to suddenly make Newcastle favourites, but there’s no doubt the feel around this game has shifted after this week’s events. It was always a game and competition that was going to mean more to those trophy-starved Newcastle fans than Liverpool supporters who have seen their team win this specific pot twice in the last three years and, spoiler alert, are going to win a bigger one later this season.
But the inevitability of that title win and Tuesday’s disappointment make this a curious game for Liverpool now. The season is, obviously, going to end up an enormously successful one on the back of what was back in August wildly unexpected Premier League glory. In the moment, though, Sunday’s Carabao final now looms incongruously as the last game of Liverpool’s season that actually matters. And it’s only mid-March.
After that it’s an international break and a box-ticking exercise until the Premier League title is mathematically confirmed. It is the absolute definition of Nice Problem To Have, but it’s still a curious way to end the season. Such utter crushing dominance of the league just sits oddly alongside going out of the truly season-long cups so early.
It does perhaps help refocus minds on this game, though, after that midweek heartbreak. You’ve got a couple of months to wallow in the past, but for one last time this season Liverpool are required in the present.
Team to watch: Arsenal
While Liverpool have no more meaningful league football to play and might weirdly miss it, Arsenal will be keen to take this weekend’s opportunity to make sure they don’t accidentally find themselves playing some important games in the run-in.
Arsenal would love to be able to focus fully on winning the Champions League but they do need to just take a tiny bit of care to ensure they’re in it again next season. They should, obviously, be fine. But they can’t really afford to spend too long mourning the latest demise of their title fight, something that seems to die anew every weekend now.
It is now all but mathematically certain that fifth place will be enough to qualify for next season’s Champions League, but there are still a large bunch of clubs in the hunt for those places and Arsenal would dearly love to keep that squabbling bunch arguing over third, fourth and fifth thank you very much.
Victory over Chelsea this weekend would be a large step towards locking down second place, but defeat would delay that prospect beyond the interlull.
Lose to Chelsea on Sunday afternoon and Arsenal will suddenly find themselves disconcertingly and frankly inexplicably only three points clear of Enzo Maresca’s daft lads, while potentially also only one point above Nottingham Forest and even a familiar feeling of dread at being just five clear of Man City.
Player to watch: Bruno Fernandes
No Premier League outfield player has racked up more minutes for club and country this season than Bruno Fernandes, with Thursday night’s win over Real Sociedad in the Europa League marking Manchester United’s full transition into Bruno Fernandes FC.
There are a great many players who are so integral to their teams you wonder how they would manage without them, but the sheer numbers tell us that nowhere is this more true than United and Bruno. This Is Bruno Fernandes Football Club We’re Talking About.
And the fact that even with him United have been really quite conspicuously rotten on a really quite alarming number of occasions if anything only exaggerates his performance further. What would United look like without their talisman? It quite literally doesn’t bear thinking about.
Perhaps the most compelling element to Bruno Fernandes’ outsized importance to United is how it has remained constant through the manager shift. He isn’t, in truth, a player obviously ideally suited to the Ruben Amorim system, but what he’s done is show that great players can adapt to a system and make it work for them, and they for it.
With the way United’s season now shapes up, we may get the opportunity to see precisely what United look like without Bruno Fernandes a bit more often. It may even start this weekend at Leicester.
Ruben Amorim may say nothing can save United’s season, but what’s beyond doubt is that nothing they do in the league between now and the end of May can do so. Only winning the Europa League has any chance of shifting the needle, and that tournament must now be the priority. The chances to give Bruno a much-needed and hard-earned breather come now in a Premier League season long since doomed to be United’s worst since football was invented.
But even if Fernandes is rested against Leicester, he remains the player to watch. Because so thoroughly are United now built around him that his absence will be every bit as notable as his presence.
Manager to watch: Thomas Frank
It’s the match literally everybody is calling El Might Become Next Manager Of Spurs If They’re Not Careful-ico, Thomas Frank’s Brentford travel to Andoni Iraola’s Bournemouth for what should be an enormously watchable slice of Saturday evening entertainment.
Brentford are down to 12th and in danger of meandering towards the end of the season after the bizarre and total collapse of their previously impeccable home form in recent months. They probably do need to continue their improved away form here if they are to remain significant runners in the European fight without requiring the nonsense “If this, then that, and then that” scenarios where Villa and Chelsea and Spurs or United sweep the European pots while finishing outside the European places themselves.
Bournemouth, meanwhile, have blipped at an enormously inopportune time with a pair of back-to-back defeats followed by the most draw-that-feels-like-a-defeat imaginable at Spurs last weekend. Despite that, though, a victory here could lift them right back into contention for that now all-important fifth spot.
Football League game to watch: Sheffield Wednesday v Sheffield United
That’s the good stuff, isn’t it? The Premier League season may be moribund, with neither a title race nor relegation fight to engage us, but you never get that kind of nonsense from the Championship.
Instead there’s a tasty Sunday lunchtime offering from Hillsborough that carries huge weight beyond local bragging rights for both clubs, with the Blades needing the points in their battle with Leeds and Burnley for automatic promotion while the Owls, even sitting as they do down in 11th, know a derby win keeps them firmly in the play-off equation.
European game to watch: Atletico Madrid v Barcelona
It seems there’s a huge title clash every fortnight in La Liga currently, with the latest pitting third-placed Atletico against the form horse of Barcelona.
There is still only a single point separating the top three in Spain, but it does now look Barcelona’s title to lose. They have a game in hand and are avoiding the slip-ups that have dogged both Madrid clubs recently.
A win here for either side wouldn’t be decisive, but it is clearly Atleti’s need that is currently the greater, if they can lift themselves after their latest absurd Champions League misfortune against their big bully local rivals Real.