Big Weekend: Newcastle v Man Utd, Salah, Arsenal, Glasner, Der Klassiker
Newcastle are gunning for third even though fifth is now definitely enough, while how do Arsenal follow that night against Madrid, Glasner takes his turn with the Spurs links and it’s time for Mo Salah to stop slacking and earn that new contract. Sort of.
Game to watch: Newcastle v Manchester United
It wasn’t the main headline news from Arsenal’s Rice-based dismantling of Real Madrid on Tuesday night, but the result was a good one for Newcastle because it confirmed that fifth place in the Premier League this season will be enough for Champions League football next year.
While it was Arsenal’s stunning win that sealed the deal, Newcastle and the rest of the Champions League chasers owe United some thanks too. They’ve lobbed plenty of points in the coefficient pot across what is, absurdly really, still the only unbeaten effort from anyone in the Champions or Europa League this season.
There is no chance of United benefitting from those coefficient points. Not indirectly anyway. They could, we guess, still end up actually winning the Europa League. Which would be funny. Because they are so bad, you see.
Newcastle are not bad. Newcastle should not, really, be thinking about fifth place right now. Third place seems a very reasonable target for a club where all is currently rosy. The silverware is secure, and even here the fixture list has been kind. If you’re a big club that finds itself outside Europe, then all you should want is to play other big clubs who are in Europe just after those games. Especially when, as in United’s case, those European games are now all that matters because there is literally not one possible sequence of results that renders their league efforts anything more than an embarrassing shambles.
One theoretical disadvantage of playing United is that it’s been shunted to the Sunday, for being both obviously the best match of the weekend and also inevitably for more mundane Europa League schedule-based reasons. It means Newcastle do face the prospect of all their top-five rivals having lumped some pressure on them.
The flipside of that is that it was also true last week, and pretty much all those rivals simply f**ked it instead. Because all of them are a bit sh*t, really. Newcastle haven’t been without their flaws this season, but the idea of them emerging as the third-best team in the country feels entirely sound at this time. Three more points against a still flailing, still inconsistent Man United would help.
Team to watch: Arsenal
Almost as a social experiment if nothing else. How do they react to what happened on Tuesday night? How do they handle going from that staggering, continent-shaking victory to a humdrum and, let’s be entirely honest here, largely meaningless Premier League game against Brentford?
Sure, the right noises will be made about keeping the pressure on Liverpool and asking questions and tying down second place and all the rest of it.
But everyone saying or hearing that stuff knows it’s bollocks. And that’s fine. It’s not unprofessional or disrespectful to think the two games against Real Madrid – the one you have so spectacularly won and the one in which you must now endeavour not to f**k it up – will dominate the thoughts far more than a league game that has so little riding on it now.
It does make watching Arsenal this weekend a fascinating concept, though. Feels like absolutely anything they do this weekend can and will be explained away as the inevitable consequence of Tuesday night. That game, that result, is just so seismic that it will swallow this one up whatever happens. And also ensure that whatever happens in this game will be judged to have far more to do with Real Madrid than it does Brentford, too.
Another thumping Arsenal win? Riding the crest of a wave. More dropped points? An inevitable Champions League comedown and a clear indication of where their priorities now lie. Grind out a tough win? Ah, that’s the sort of game they weren’t winning before the shot of confidence they got from beating Real Madrid.
What’s also good is that absolutely all of those options feel equally plausible.
Player to watch: Mo Salah
Looks like the new contract is in the bag, which is just as well for a player who has gone distinctly off the boil.
It shows just how brutal the game can be for a player in their 30s, just how quickly people can turn, that Salah is approaching the final strides of a season that even if it contains not one more goal or assist would still see him walk away with both the Golden Boot and the playmaker awards as well as every player-of-the-year gong going and, let’s not forget, the actual Premier League title and the talk now is that maybe it is the right time for Liverpool to move on after all because he hasn’t done much in the last four games or so.
It is possible that the football has suddenly left him. But it seems unlikely. Probably he’s just a little bit tired after producing what is statistically one of the more absurd seasons in Barclays history.
Still, though. Could do with something against West Ham to avoid a third straight Premier League without a goal contribution of any sort for the first time this season.
And while taking nothing away from the astonishing season he is having overall, it’s not just the numbers on the page that have dried up for Salah. He’s clearly not been anywhere near the level he’s hit for most of the season for the last month or so.
For him and for Liverpool, if not any longer for the title race itself, it’d be good to see some confirmation that what remains a very small wobble in the grand scheme isn’t in fact the start of something bigger. Just to put minds at rest.
Manager to watch: Oliver Glasner
Inevitable, perhaps, that Palace’s sparkling form in recent months would leave Glasner the latest unfortunate soul to see all that good work punished by links to the impossible Tottenham job.
Andoni Iraola, Marco Silva and Thomas Frank have all suffered similar fates this season, and now Glasner must carry the burden that comes to all over-achieving managers of the Premier League’s fattened ‘middle class’ these days.
In fairness, failing to beat Southampton is a feat so Spursy that not even Spurs could manage it, so maybe Glasner would be perfect for them.
But with Ange Postecoglou’s grip on the Spurs job ever looser after a 1-1 draw in the first leg of a Europa League quarter-final into which he has thrown all his few remaining eggs, any kind of result for Glasner and Palace at a still unconvincing Manchester City on Saturday lunchtime is only going to ramp up that particular noise.
Football League game to watch: Doncaster v AFC Wimbledon
The League Two promotion race remains the most keenly contested in the Football League this season with just five points separating the top six.
Feels like there’s a six-pointer between two of them every week at the moment, and this weekend it’s fourth-placed Doncaster against fifth-placed Wimbledon.
Doncaster do have the advantage of a game in hand over all the teams around them – that’s coming up against Salford in midweek – but the downside is having three games in the space of six days as a result.
Can’t worry about that just now, though, with no danger they will be looking anywhere beyond Saturday lunchtime’s crunch in which a defeat would see Wimbledon leapfrog them in the table.
European game to watch: Bayern Munich v Borussia Dortmund
Not perhaps the heftiest Klassiker of recent years, but Dortmund’s pedigree if not this season’s results still marks this game out as perhaps the last significant hurdle between Bayern Munich and a return to Bundesliga champion status after all last season’s unpleasantness.
Dortmund would no doubt love to shove a stick in Bayern’s spokes at this time and would normally be able to point to Bayern’s Champions League first-leg defeat to Inter as a source of potential weakness had they themselves not followed that up by getting slapped absolutely silly by Barcelona a day later.
Does rather feel like the one fixture neither side would have wanted to sit between the two legs of such difficult Champions League quarter-finals that all else being equal would have been far easier to focus on fully had the fixture computer spat out any game other than this.