Big Weekend: Manchester derby, Alexander Isak, Ange Postecoglou, West Ham

The Premier League roars back after the international break with an absolute cracker of a weekend in store.

There’s a Manchester derby where the Heavyweight Crisis Club belt is on the line, there’s the return of Ange Postecoglou, there’s the prospect of Alexander Isak and all manner of other shiny late-summer signings making their debuts, and in the Championship the long-awaited return of a south-coast derby to the league schedule after a 13-year absence.

It is, in short, a very Big Weekend. Enjoy.

Game to watch: Manchester City v Manchester United

A Sunday afternoon treat in store for us all in one of those games absolutely guaranteed to provide narrative out the wazoo no matter what happens.

The fixture computer has been cruel indeed to Manchester City, compelling them to play their first two home games against the teams who inflicted the most embarrassing league defeats upon them at the Etihad last season.

History has already repeated itself thanks to Spurs’ alarmingly controlled and tension-free 2-0 victory a few weeks ago, and City really cannot afford any kind of repeat of the late nonsense United pulled on them in a 2-1 win during the depths of City’s late 2024 despair.

Whoever loses this really is in big trouble.

If it’s United, then the difficulty of the fixture list will provide only scant mitigation for a poor league start (not to mention the Grimsby unpleasantness) in which Ruben Amorim has been lucky to nick a point against Fulham and even luckier to beat Burnley at home.

He already sits atop the reformed Sack Race now Nuno Espirito Santo has been Marinakised and has both Chelsea and Liverpool to worry about in the weeks ahead.

If it’s City, then the early crisis club mantle passes to the blue half of Manchester after three straight defeats and a title challenge petering out in mid-September and renewed questions about whether Pep Guardiola has the energy or desire to follow through on building himself another great City side on the back of all 24/25’s relative struggle.

The most damning thing for City would be the fact that those three straight defeats would have come without a meaningful title rival in sight; that looms with next week’s trip to the Emirates which really would start to look like a fixture that could end City’s Premier League season before we’ve even reached the second international break.

Or it could be a draw, in which case no firm answers can be reached but they’re probably both f*cked.

So yeah. A Sunday afternoon treat for absolutely everyone, except for anyone who supports at least one and very possibly both of these clubs.

READ: Premier League mood rankings: 14 places between Liverpool and Man Utd

Manager to watch: Ange Postecoglou

Here he comes. He’s back. Angeball is inevitable.

Nottingham Forest insisted they really didn’t want to get rid of Nuno Espirito Santo and had no intention to do so right up until the moment they, alas and alack, felt they simply had no choice given the breakdown in trust for which they were in no way responsible. Which all means the negotiations to appoint a replacement they hadn’t given a moment’s thought to previously were conducted in record time, with Ange Postecoglou appointed mere hours after Nuno’s midnight axe.

Really, it’s just another reminder of what an efficient, well-run club Nottingham Forest are these days. That’s just the speed at which they can get things done.

And another example of how efficient and clear-headed Forest are is in the way they’ve gone straight out and snaffled themselves a manager to provide seamless, frictionless continuity given the obvious similarities in the way he and Nuno operate.

Yes, if unfortunate circumstances outside your control just after the end of the transfer window force you to replace the manager who last season delivered success wildly beyond any reasonable expectation, then really all you can do is go out and appoint the closest thing you can find to what you’ve lost.

Or, of course, there’s the other option, which is to look at what’s worked so well for you and that departing manager and the squad you’d built for him over the last 18 months, and then appoint literally the most polar opposite manager it is possible to imagine, one whose tactics led a bigger and wealthier and far more established club to 17th place last season.

It’s a genuinely brilliant slice of nonsense, this, and one that has absolutely no downside. It’s a plan so stupid that it might in fact be genius and actually work, in which case: great. There really are few things more entertaining to watch in football these days than Angeball when it works.

But do you know what is one of the few things more entertaining to watch in football these days than Angeball when it works? Angeball when it doesn’t.

If you’re not enormously excited by the prospect of Nikola Milenkovic playing a high line then we really are very different people.

At the other end, though, Forest absolutely do have the attacking tools to cause teams serious pain when given freedom and licence to roam and with chests swelled with pride by one of Ange’s patented inspirational team talks.

There’s a reason everyone who has played for Postecoglou seems to adore the bloke. It’s just who he is, mate.

And of course the fixture computer has sent him to Arsenal for his first game back in the Premier League.

It’s unlikely Ange has had time to get all his ideas across to his new charges, which for this game might well be for the best. It is a bit of a free hit for him anyway. Just pump the players’ tyres and send them out there. Get any kind of result and it sets him up for potentially the sort of instant ‘WTF?’ impact he had in those very early games at Tottenham.

Lose, and he can just come out in the post-match interview and say ‘Warra trophy, mate’ and he still wins. Perfect.

Player to watch: Alexander Isak

Always a highlight of this first post-interlull matchday, of course. We’ve all been starved of delicious Barclays for an agonising, drawn-out fortnight but when it comes back it comes back strong with all those late summer signings set for debuts, from Isak against Burnley to his assorted replacements for Newcastle, to Xavi Simons and Randal Kolo Muani at Spurs, or Harvey Elliott for Villa, and the quite brilliant fact we really don’t actually know with any compelling certainty who will be in either goal for the Manchester derby.

But Isak is clearly the star attraction here. Given that he’s short of match sharpness and had precious little time with his new team-mates due to confirmation of his move coming so late in the window and having to head pretty much straight off to international duty with Sweden, it’s very possible – likely even – that he is only on the bench for Liverpool at Turf Moor.

That’s only a minor consolation for Burnley, though, who will have to deal with a still-elite attack posing nightmarish threats from every direction while also knowing that just as the fatigue of chasing Wirtz and Ekitike and Salah around for an hour or so really starts to kick in, they’re likely to have to deal with perhaps the Premier League’s best centre-forward stepping off the bench with sky-high motivation and myriad points to prove. Very best of luck to you.

Team to watch: West Ham

West Ham’s 3-0 win at Nottingham Forest just before the international break was perhaps the single most discombobulating result of that entire 30-match intro to the new Premier League season.

Kneejerk assessments had been made of West Ham in the previous fortnight, and the consensus was clear: they were rubbish, and many people feared for them, they really did. We did. We do.

But the chaotic final 10 minutes at the City Ground changed everything. It provided cover for Forest to do what they obviously wanted to do to Nuno, for one thing, but also sent the Hammers into the international break looking a very different beast and with potentially a very different season to the one everyone had prescribed for them.

There is still the sense that it was just a freak nonsense. The goals coming in a rush at the end as they did certainly adds to that sense.

So the challenge for Graham Potter and his players is to immediately disprove that theory. To immediately use it as a springboard to launch a season that had started so miserably.

And for that reason there really are few better fixtures to follow it for West Ham than Tottenham at home. Spurs fans have long mocked West Ham for this game being the Hammers’ cup final, noise which quietened when West Ham inconveniently reached and won an actual cup final while Spurs were languishing in trophyless banterland.

Last season’s Europa League win means that noise will return for a fixture that has a compelling history of high-level nonsense, one that has featured dramatic late winners for Spurs from names as varied as Paul Stalteri, Eric Dier and Gareth Bale, to Manuel Lanzini halting Tottenham’s bid to put the pressure on Chelsea in 2017 and more recent match-winning exploits from Michail Antonio and Jesse Lingard.

West Ham haven’t lost at home to Tottenham since 2019, when Jose Mourinho’s first game in charge of Spurs produced a chaotic 3-2 win that was in no way whatsoever a sign of things to come.

The last three have ended in 1-1 draws, and even that would be enough to give West Ham something to work with moving forward. Which really didn’t look likely after those two miserable opening defeats and pitiful Carabao exit.

Football League game to watch: Southampton v Portsmouth

The real El Clasicoast returns as a league fixture for the first time since a 2-2 Championship draw in April 2012, and 13 years in which assorted miseries have befallen both clubs. Especially Southampton, but especially Portsmouth.

A Premier League team in 2010 became a League Two one by 2013 and it’s been a long slow climb back to the second tier and renewed acquaintances with their local rivals.

Southampton themselves were in League One during Portsmouth’s final Premier League season, and just seven years later were completing a fourth successive season in the top flight’s top eight under managers like Mauricio Pochettino and Ronald Koeman.

They then fell off, bobbed around a bit and last year, as Portsmouth finally dragged themselves back up into the Championship, Southampton tumbled back into it after the second worst Premier League season in history.

And it’s Portsmouth who’ve now made the better start to this season ahead of the short trip to St Mary’s.

European game to watch: Juventus v Inter

Juventus bid to make it three wins from three at the start of the Serie A season against an Inter side whose opening-day high of a 5-0 win over Torino was followed by a real back-to-earth-with-a-bump of a home defeat to Udinese after taking an early lead.

Juventus haven’t, in truth, been wholly convincing against either Parma or Genoa, but two wins from two games without conceding a goal is never to be sniffed at.

We’ll have a better idea about where both these teams might be heading this season by Saturday evening.

Women’s Super League game to watch: London City Lionesses v Manchester United

The newly-promoted Lionesses host their first ever WSL match this weekend, with life not getting much easier after a chastening defeat at the hands of Arsenal last week.

There are plenty of reasons to think this weekend might go differently, though. World-record signing Grace Geyoro could come straight into the side, while a thin-looking United squad could well be a touch weary after a 1-0 midweek defeat in the first leg of their Champions League qualifier against Brann.

That result also leaves Marc Skinner’s side likely to have one eye on the crucial return leg next week and vulnerable to a London City side who will have laser focus and history-making on their mind.