Big Weekend: Chelsea v Liverpool, Arsenal, Isak, Emery, EFL final day, Kane silverware
Harry Kane is going to win silverware at last, but won’t actually be on the pitch when it happens, while Chelsea hope for a beach-bound Liverpool as the Champions League scramble continues.
Game to watch: Chelsea v Liverpool
The discourse asserts that Chelsea face a humiliation on Sunday in having to provide the newly crowned champions with the dreaded guard of honour. We would contend they are in fact perfectly happy with the situation.
Arsenal not winning the league and Spurs getting pumped 5-1 doesn’t exactly sound like a bad day for Chelsea anyway, and that’s before we give any consideration at all to the high possibility of Liverpool players having the slippers and cigars out, possibly while also being on the beach, with the serious business of their season now complete.
For just so many reasons, we don’t think they’ll win this one 5-1, let’s put it that way. For Chelsea, it remains a game of vast importance.
Even if we accept Villa’s chances of a top-five finish may be slip-sliding away with three points and a wildly inferior goal difference a tough gap to make up even allowing for the fact they are fortunate enough to still have both Manchester United and Tottenham to play this season, it still leaves four teams currently separated by two points squabbling over three places in next season’s Big Cup.
By the time Chelsea kick off against Liverpool on Sunday afternoon they will know what everyone else has been up to, barring Nottingham Forest with their esoteric Thursday-Monday schedule.
That’s either going to pile pressure on or take pressure off a Chelsea side who will applaud the champions and then hope desperately that Arne Slot’s men have enjoyed this last week a little too much.
Team to watch: Arsenal
There are still t’s to cross and lower-case j’s to be dotted on Arsenal’s second-place finish in the Premier League but let’s be honest, that has long since ceased to be the real quiz for the Gunners.
Saturday evening’s clash with a Bournemouth team that defeated them earlier in the season is all about two things that are really one thing. How will they respond to Tuesday’s night’s Champions League semi-final first-leg defeat to PSG and what pointers can we pick up for Wednesday night’s rescue mission in Paris?
Let’s be clear from the start here. Bournemouth are a good football team and Andoni Iraola a fine manager. But, and we make no apology for this molten take, they are not PSG. There is only so much to be learned.
But we would expect to see an Arsenal team with a less laissez-faire approach to midfield marshalling. We’d expect to see Thomas Partey tasked with getting back up to speed having spent Tuesday night thinking about what he’d done with that unfeasibly foolish yellow card in Madrid and how he might go about making it up to his team-mates.
We don’t expect to see the line-out free-kick routine again; that was a nonsense. We don’t expect the Emirates to be quite so loud as it was just before the PSG game, nor quite so quiet as it was four minutes into the PSG game.
But we do feel like we need to see something from Arsenal. The game doesn’t really matter, but the vibes do. There will surely be changes with one eye on Paris and that makes perfect sense, but however different the opposition and the stakes you have to think Arsenal will want to give themselves and their fans reason to believe they can pull off the necessary madness next week.
In an odd way, it might be worse for Bournemouth than if Arsenal had done to PSG what they did to Madrid.
Player to watch: Alexander Isak
Erling Haaland is back in training ahead of schedule, with Man City retaining hope of easing him back into Premier League action before the FA Cup final and Club World Cup that we keep forgetting about and wish we didn’t keep then getting reminded about. (Apologies to readers who feel the same way.)
He won’t feature against Wolves on Friday night, but it’s a reminder for Isak that Sunday’s trip to Brighton represents a chance to nail down second place in the Premier League scoring charts this season and his status as the division’s best actual striker this season with only Mo Salah and his nonsense year of nonsense ahead of the Swede.
There are worse away days than Brighton for goalscorers, with the Seagulls posting the second worst defensive record in the top half. Brighton are also one of few teams Isak is yet to score against in the Premier League having drawn four blanks against them in league competition despite scoring in the FA Cup defeat earlier this season.
Manager to watch: Unai Emery
A home game with Fulham suddenly feels of quite outsized importance to Aston Villa’s whole season. The heroic failure against PSG in the Champions League and dismal failure against Crystal Palace in the FA Cup means hope of joining Newcastle in the ‘ended our trophy drought’ comfy seats has now gone, while anything less than victory over Fulham will leave Villa facing a near impossible task to claw their way back into the Champions League positions this season.
Even with an extra one.
It all leaves a few harsh questions about whether the season, about whether Emery, has been a success. About whether that spectacularly fun but undeniably expensive January loan splurge was actually worth it if none remain at Villa Park beyond May and PSR chickens start coming home to roost next year.
Defeat to Fulham would even raise the prospect of Villa finishing below the Cottagers and maybe even Brighton. It’s not Tottenham bad. It’s not Man United bad. But for a team and manager that have done so very much right in trying to re-establish Villa among the Premier League’s leading clubs a trophyless season with a mid-table finish would feel distinctly squibbish.
Villa have been on quite a journey this year, and it still feels like there’s one significant turn left yet. It just isn’t yet clear in which direction.
Football League game to watch: All of them
No point picking just one. The final day of the regular season across the Championship, League One and League Two is always magnificent nonsense.
In the Championship, even with the automatic promotion places and one relegation spot settled there is still half the division with something, however mathematically implausible it might be, to aim at.
League One has less riding on it than you might hope, but the League Two promotion and play-off picture also has plenty still to be resolved on what is always the most As Things Stand day in the English calendar.
European game to watch: RB Leipzig v Bayern Munich
Victory for Bayern will restore the earth to its axis and see them reclaim the Bundesliga title they infamously lost last year and thus at long, long last allow Harry Kane to win the first trophy of his career and at last join the list of those players to get their hands on something after leaving Tottenham.
Obviously, because you can never fully de-Spurs someone as deeply, profoundly Spurs as poor old Kane is, his first ever trophy will be secured while he is not in fact on the pitch having got himself suspended after a fifth booking of the season last week.
