Big Weekend: Man City v Liverpool, Chelsea, Amorim, Wood, Sheff Utd v Leeds, Bayern Munich

Proper Big Weekend, this, with lots of lovely games and narrative out the wazoo. But there’s no doubt about the Manchester City v Liverpool headliner.

Game to watch: Man City v Liverpool
Last week we called Spurs-United the game to watch of the season, on the basis that both of them are just awful and that whatever happened it was bound to be worth watching to laugh at whichever one of them sh*t the bed harder on the day.

In the end it was actually quite sad and hard to watch. Turns out they are if anything, Clive, almost too bad at football. Especially Spurs, but especially Man United.

So hats off to the fixture computer in its infinite will-one-day-rise-up-and-enslave-us-all wisdom in seeing that it had the essence of a good idea there but had just gone too far with it, and giving us this tweak on the same idea.

Here we have two teams who aren’t quite in the best of places and won’t be feeling as confident as they otherwise might for this fixture. And this one actually means something beyond the theoretical existence of a relegation threat if Ipswich or Leicester can pull their finger out.

This is a huge one in the title race. Liverpool are in the midst of an epic bottle job having *checks notes* moved eight points clear with a draw at Aston Villa and *checks notes again* not lost any of their last 22 Premier League games.

Seems like the sky might not be entirely falling in, but the mood has significantly darkened around Liverpool, who do suddenly look slightly wearier, slightly heavier of leg, than they have for most of a season they have generally found almost absurdly straightforward.

It’s not actually a crisis, obviously, despite what the Mailbox thinks, but it hasn’t been great since the FA Cup exit at Plymouth.

The draw at Everton absolutely felt like a defeat even before the post-whistle headloss that eviscerated the overriding sense of calm Liverpool’s serene season had previously enjoyed.

The win over Wolves was tremendously hard work, and while a 2-2 draw at Villa is in itself clearly not a catastrophe it does now mean it’s four points dropped in a week for a team that potentially now only has a five-point cushion over Arsenal when the stagger unwinds.

Liverpool could absolutely have done with a nice easy home game this weekend to settle nerves and cool some overheating heads. Instead they’ve got a trip to Man City where f**k knows what will happen or which City will turn up. And also for how long which City will turn up.

Trying to overturn a one-goal Champions League deficit at the Bernabeu was always a tall order, but City could have at least given it a go. They showed an embarrassing lack of fight and the comparison with, say, Celtic’s attempt at something even less likely in Munich is an unflattering one.

We still get glimpses of the old City here and there. Sometimes they are even able to hold or even extend the 3-0 leads it gives them. But there really does seem something fundamentally broken about this team and its manager.

By City and Pep Guardiola’s standards, having only the FA Cup to play for before February is out is an absolute barren wasteland of a season. And the stark truth is that even with no Arsenal or Liverpool to worry about in that competition, you still don’t particularly fancy them to win it.

This one game, though, does feel like it could suit City. Embarrassing as it might be to go from the star turn of a title fight to mere potential agent of chaos, it’s a role clubs have enjoyed before and the sight of their greatest rivals of the last seven years might just bring the best out of what’s left of what City used to be.

And we can surely all agree that whatever happens here, the sight of Arsenal fans cheerfully and enthusiastically and correctly cheering on Man City given, well, everything that’s happened in the last two-and-a-half years, is one we can all enjoy.

Team to watch: Chelsea
We live in a truly blessed period of time right now. One where absolutely none of the Big Six – or as they now have to be called the Traditional Big Six or Old Big Six (both of which are hilarious names anyway for something that is, at best, 15 years old) – are entirely happy with life.

Spurs and United are in full-blown crisis as we know, Liverpool have hit their first truly tricky patch of the season and not yet dealt with it at all reassuringly, the City Empire is falling apart in front of our very eyes, and Arsenal have entirely run out of forwards.

And then there’s Chelsea. They have undoubtedly got away with their nonsense a bit. In part that’s because of the sheer spectacular scale of the cover being provided elsewhere. And also a bit because they’ve only really collapsed back to roughly where people maybe thought they’d be anyway.

But they have also been really quite crap for really quite a long time now. They’ve gone out of the FA Cup, which the manager tried to suggest was a good thing because it meant they could concentrate on the league, and then promptly lost even more heavily in the league to the exact same mid-table team that just knocked them out of the FA Cup.

This is a very bad look anywhere, but really is unacceptably small-time at Chelsea.

Especially as ‘concentrate on the league’ now means ‘trying to qualify for Europe’ rather than ‘challenge for the title’. They’ve won just two of their last nine Premier League games, and the last time they beat anyone half-decent was Aston Villa back at the start of December.

Chelsea’s 3-0 victory that day took them second in the table with a record identical to Arsenal’s – right down to goals scored.

Now they face Villa again, but this time sitting down in sixth and 10 points behind Arsenal with Liverpool long gone over the horizon.

The Champions League remains a perfectly viable target – especially with fifth place likely to be enough – but there is also now a very real danger of missing Europe altogether through the league. They will still win the Europa Conference, but it’s a vaguely undignified way of getting back into Europe for a club of Chelsea’s stature and expenditure.

Defeat at Villa Park would suddenly bring Villa right back into the mix as well, taking them within a point of the faltering Blues.

Player to watch: Chris Wood
While the two title rivals do battle without so much as a Proper Centre Forward between them, this weekend sees a clash of two of the very best the Barclays has to offer. There’s a lovely contrast in styles too.

In Alexander Isak there is the complete modern forward, a player of great skill and finesse who oozes quality and attracts the attention of the world’s best.

Then there is the former Newcastle striker now tearing it up at Nottingham Forest. It always feels like a thinly veiled dig, because Wood’s game really isn’t all about being a big strong nuisance and headers and pointy elbows. You just don’t score the number of goals he’s scored this season playing exclusively that way.

But he is undoubtedly a striker more from the old school, and a great deal of Forest’s success has been built on the principle of playing unapologetically to his strengths – strengths which Premier League defences really don’t have to deal with all that often in big 2025.

And having scored a hat-trick on his previous return to St James’ Park in a season when neither he nor Forest were the force they are this time around, he should feel pretty confident about adding to the 18 goals that currently see him sat neatly if faintly incongruously between Erling Haaland (19) and Isak (17) as the three undoubted stand-out centre-forwards the Barclays currently boasts.

Manager to watch: Ruben Amorim
It’s easy to feel plenty of sympathy for Amorim, a manager who didn’t create any of the problems that are really to blame for Manchester United’s malaise but who still has to answer questions about them and be the public face of the latest round of Scrooge McRatcliffe’s cost-cutting misery.

But it is increasingly undeniable that he isn’t currently helping himself or the club get out of this mess. Yes, what’s being attempted is a painful and necessary full culture reset that is exposing both the current playing staff and the recruitment that led United’s squad to this point of despair, but they also really, surely, don’t need to be this wilfully, stubbornly bad.

Yes, it is a shocking indictment on the technique and football intelligence of the squad of players Amorim has that they are so entirely incapable of playing his system, one that has a track record of success when attempted by players who can deliver it.

That, though, is the reality Amorim must face and address. There is arguably a case that he needed to highlight just how inadequate the squad was to hammer home just how much had to change, but that point if it ever did need making has now been laboured beyond comprehension.

With the threat of relegation still largely hypothetical given the state of the bottom four it seems unlikely he’ll shift course now, but it truly is a wild state of affairs when you look at the league table and conclude a) that Man United’s likeliest finishing position is probably now 16th and subsequently b) that this is neither surprising nor shocking.

And the fixture computer is at its most mischievous once again here, sending Amorim and United at their very lowest ebb to face a rejuvenated Everton side who have leapfrogged them in the table and are bouncing along wonderfully well since the return of David Moyes, the first but absolutely not last manager to be chewed up and spat out by the impossible reality of post-Fergie Manchester United.

Amorim did register one of his small handful of Premier League wins at United against Everton back in December, but December is so long ago now as to be ancient, irrelevant history. Moyes wasn’t around for one thing, but if you really want to get a grasp on just how far in the dim, distant past that 4-0 United win really was, two of the goals were scored by Marcus Rashford.

Football League game to watch: Sheffield United v Leeds
Does Monday night come under any sensible definition of ‘weekend’? No, of course it doesn’t. But if you think we’re not going to cheat to get this in, then you’re dreaming.

We can pretend there’s a bigger game in the Football League that conveniently takes place on the actual weekend, but we’d only be fooling ourselves. This is a proper heavyweight title clash between two big beasts and comes hot on the heels of another Monday night Leeds game that had everything you could wish for as Sunderland gave it everything before being undone at the very last second.

With Burnley seemingly determined to 0-0 their way into the play-offs under football terrorist Scott Parker, it does seem like these two will both be back in the Premier League next season anyway. But Monday night will tell us a great deal about who might do so as champions.

European game to watch: Bayern Munich v Eintracht Frankfurt
Bayern have spent the last week doing just enough. A goalless draw at Bayer Leverkusen kept the Bundesliga title race firmly in their control, while the late drama of their tie-winning goal against Celtic in the Champions League masked a ropey performance.

They are ticking off obstacles, though, however unconvincingly, and have another such to clear on Sunday against third-place Eintracht Frankfurt, whose role as potential disruptor in the title race continues next week when they host Leverkusen. If both those games go against Frankfurt, then we really will be in the end days of the Harry Kane Trophy Curse.