Big Weekend: Liverpool v Arsenal, Bruno Fernandes, Pierre Sage, Fulham, Der Klassiker

This Biggest of Weekends features a positively gluttonous Saturday that kicks off with Chelsea v Man United and has plenty more to offer across the subsequent 10 hours.

That does leave Sunday looking a little bare, with just a single game as its offering. That single game is Liverpool v Arsenal, though, so we think we’ll manage.

Game to watch: Liverpool v Arsenal
We know Arsenal fans are among the planet’s most reliably reasonable humans, and thus we’re certain they’ll take this in the spirit it’s intended.

It would be quite useful if Liverpool can turn them over this weekend.

No, wait, listen. We’ve got our reasons. Well, reason. Basically, we’d quite like there to be a title race. A real one that we can actually enjoy, not the existential crisis brought on by wondering what if anything Man City points mean.

If we assume as we surely must that City aren’t anything more than overpowered potential disruptors in this season’s title picture, then even at this early stage we’re starting to run out of viable contenders to go up against the champions.

We all got confused by Chelsea signing some useful footballers, didn’t we? Caught us all out and we thought maybe they might be able to do it, but it does turn out that to challenge for the title you do need to be able to offer up something approaching competent defending at least some of the time.

Brighton have been great fun, and we still can’t entirely rule out something Leicester 2016 adjacent from them. But there’s no doubt that They Couldn’t, Could They? stocks were severely dented by their own defeat at Anfield last time out.

It already leaves us looking at Liverpool or bust. And even if Liverpool do win on Sunday, we’re still not sure we’d be that convinced. It would, though, take them within three points of Arsenal with over a quarter of the season done. It wouldn’t be nothing. They’d be there, or, at the very least, thereabouts.

Defeat, though, and we’re already facing the prospect of Arsenal skipping gleefully into the distance with only City for pointless company at the summit with November barely begun.

Player to watch: Bruno Fernandes
Really helpful, this one. Normally, ‘Player to watch’ is the toughest category of the Big Weekend’s Big Four categories. You’re a hostage to fortune. Your man could pick up an injury. On more than one occasion they’ve in fact had a suspension that – listen, fair play – we should probably have realised. And even if they are not injured and not suspended, there’s still never an absolute cast-iron guarantee that the manager – capricious beasts that they are – will actually pick him.

So this is a rare treat. Because Fernandes is still the player to watch this weekend even if Michael Carrick doesn’t actually pick him. Especially if Michael Carrick doesn’t actually pick him. He’ll be even more watchable sat scowling on the bench as Chelsea go 3-0 up and the commentator, with grim inevitability, offers ‘a penny for his thoughts’ while Carrick studiously avoids making eye-contact with his erstwhile (we assume) captain.

But it still works even if we do have to merely settle for Bruno playing. Will he be in full point-to-prove mode? Will Carrick actually have pulled off an ingenious piece of man-management that proves he really does have the minerals for such a huge job?

And on the subject of Carrick, it occurs to us that the Mailbox wag who suggested the solution for United was to sack Carrick and immediately appoint him as interim manager has kind of got his wish. With United’s Big Brains deciding to keep Carrick purely because they haven’t yet finished arguing over who gets the casting vote on the identity of his replacement, he now has a distinctly interim-adjacent caretaker air about him.

Even by Dreaded Vote of Confidence standards, this one has been bungled.

But what if it hasn’t? Remember, caretaker Carrick is actually elite. And do you know who was a conspicuously brilliant footballer under caretaker Carrick’s watch? That’s right. Mr Bruno Fernandes.

It’s all falling into place for the 4d-chess-playing very stable geniuses at INEOS. At least until about 12.47pm on Saturday when Chelsea’s fourth goal goes in.

Manager to watch: Pierre Sage
While Carrick enjoys his stay of execution at dithering Manchester United, one other remaining contender stands against him in the Sack Race. Crystal Palace’s Sage, who only came into the job in the summer but has managed just as meagre a points total in his first eight games of the season as Carrick has at United.

There have been rumblings of discontent at board level about how the man given the unenviable task of following Oliver Glasner has gone about it, and the brutal truth is that Palace are probably fortunate to have as many as the seven points they can muster.

Victory in an early six-pointer at Fulham was all rather chaotic and it’s hard to escape the idea that Sage would already be out of a job had Palace not somehow pulled off the heist of the century in beating Nottingham Forest 3-1 after a harrowing first 40 minutes in which a string of opposition chances came and went.

Despite somehow only conceding once that day, Sage’s side have shipped 19 goals in total. That’s three more than anyone else. And now even Saturday’s trip to Dr Tottenham that he’s no doubt had circled in his diary for weeks no longer holds quite the appeal it might have done a fortnight ago.

Although it should be noted that the Good Doctor’s rejuvenating powers are rarely more potent than when he’s started to feel good about himself again after a spell in the doldrums.

Team to watch: Fulham
When we first looked at Opta’s Expected Premier League table a couple of weeks ago, Fulham were the team conspicuously underperforming their xPts tally that really caught our eye. One could more straightforwardly see how, say, Bournemouth or Spurs or Nottingham Forest might easily have picked up more points from games where they had enjoyed long spells on top but failed to turn that advantage into enough on the scoreboard.

But Fulham? We’ll hold our hands up and just say we thought a post-Silva, Harry Wilson-less Fulham were just, well, a bit crap to be honest. We feared for them, we really did.

But listen, fair play. Maybe Opta were on to something, because since then they – like Bournemouth and Spurs – have picked up maximum points from their last two games and it’s all looking a bit rosier.

Those wins – both 1-0 jobs – did come against Hull and Coventry, though. Doesn’t mean they don’t count, but those are the two current odds-on favourites (alongside Manchester City, obvs) for relegation.

What if it’s those six points that are actually misleading and Fulham aren’t in fact good after all? We just don’t know at this stage. But we’ll have a better idea after Saturday evening’s trip to an Aston Villa side who have also hit their stride after a tricky start.

Football League game to watch: Norwich City v Watford
The bottom of the Championship table features all manner of teams with relatively recent Barclays pedigree, and two of them meet at Carrow Road in a fixture bristling with very early but very real six-pointer energy.

Only one place and one point separates Norwich and Watford at the moment, with both teams having won one and lost four of their last five to sit uncomfortably just outside a relegation zone currently headed by Burnley.

European game to watch: Bayern Munich v Borussia Dortmund
Freshly minted Ballon d’Or winner Harry Kane will make his first game as officially the world’s greatest player in German football’s biggest game as Borussia Dortmund head to Munich for Der Klassiker.

It is, as is so often the case, a match that pits first against second, with the two teams locked on 17 points from five games despite a Kane-and-Olise-powered Bayern having scored more than double the number of goals Dortmund have managed in their opening seven games.