The Premier League is back! Well done, everyone, another international break survived. And now very nearly a month to luxuriate in delicious Barclays before the next one comes along. Lucky us.

The football gods have seen fit to grant us a special treat this weekend as Liverpool and Manchester United bring their current very real if very different crisis experiences to an Anfield showdown that can only end with at least one team in the very deepest despair, while there’s plenty of other good stuff to be found around the country and indeed continent.

And look at that, Ange Postecoglou is still here, just about. Who’d have thought it? Not us.

Big Weekends always feel that bit bigger after a whole fortnight away, but this one would be worthy at any time of the year.

 

Game to watch: Liverpool v Manchester United

We don’t know much about the fixture computer. We like to think it is in fact a kind of giant piece of factory machinery. In our heads, it is basically Bertha. In reality, it’s probably just a laptop, isn’t it?

That’s very boring. We prefer to think of Bertha spitting out the fixtures, thank you very much. What we do know, of course, is that the fixtures computer is a mischievous scamp with a keen sense of humour.

And we wonder whether it has some kind of ‘post-interlull’ setting. Because, god bless it, the fixture computer always seems to deliver a proper big bastard of a Super Sunday primetime game as a little treat to us all for surviving the barren fortnight.

It was the Manchester derby in September. Next month, it’s the North London Derby. And now, we get the really big one. El Crisico. Mini-crisis v maxi-crisis. Liverpool v Manchester United.

Bertha, you are spoiling us.

It really has come at an ideal time for absolutely everybody apart from Liverpool and Manchester United. Whoever loses, we all win.

Either Liverpool’s mini-crisis gets upgraded, or Manchester United once again miss the chance to find that elusive second successive Premier League win in a row under a manager who has openly admitted the inability to do something as basic as win two Premier League games in a row is now living in their head. Not rent-free, Sir Jim would never allow that. But it’s there nonetheless.

Or, and this feels most likely given Liverpool are suddenly quite unsure of themselves and Manchester United aren’t very good, neither of them get the perspective-altering win they need and it’ll be a draw like it has been in each of the last two seasons. And that’s no good for either of them, really.

It is, in short, the perfect game to headline the first weekend back after the international break.

 

Team to watch: Aston Villa

Back-to-back home Premier League wins over Fulham and Burnley to go with a couple of welcome early successes in the Europa League have significantly lifted a previously gloomy mood at Villa Park.

With Villa and Forest – about whom more later in the most obvious possible way – we’ve seen almost sarcastically perfect evidence of how the Europa League can work for good or ill for a struggling team.

You can be Aston Villa, and see the Europa League help you get that winning feeling back, restore some confidence and watch that flow through rejuvenated players who suddenly see that Thursday-Sunday schedule as more opportunity than chore. Or you can be Forest, and have European competition simply represent the opportunity to be humiliated and embarrassed twice a week instead of just the once, exacerbating and further highlighting all the obvious and, let’s be fair, largely self-inflicted problems you currently face.

It is definitely better to be Villa. Having thus been able to enjoy the interlull, as much as any of us can, on the back of a far more encouraging set of results than had previously been the case, now comes crunch time.

Have Villa actually turned a serious corner, escaping from the funk that had enveloped them since such a costly missing out on Champions League football at the end of last season? Or have they just had a couple of winnable Europa games chucked in with a couple of quite gentle home Premier League games?

Villa’s trip to Spurs on Sunday afternoon should tell us a fair bit about both sides. A pre-collapse Tottenham spangled Villa 4-1 at WHL 2.0 last November, but since that result they have a truly astonishing home record in the league. And not in a good way.

They have won only three of 17 Premier League games at their own stadium in the 11 months since handing Villa that beating, with only teams as thoroughly outmatched as Southampton and Burnley or as thoroughly ridiculous as Manchester United failing to leave with anything at all.

Even this season, one in which Spurs appear far less silly than in recent years, they have managed only four points from home games against Burnley, Bournemouth and Wolves while taking 10 points from their four away games.

This is a big chance for Villa. There is perhaps no better fixture around at the moment for sitting right in the sweetspot of one where a positive result would feel like compelling evidence that things have decisively changed for the better while also being a game where such a result is relatively straightforward to obtain.

 

Manager to watch: Ange Postecoglou

It’s him until it isn’t. Still doesn’t have a win, still somehow does have a job, probably won’t if he can’t cobble together some kind of a result against Chelsea. Probably won’t cobble together some kind of a result against Chelsea.

Watching Nottingham Forest this season has already reached that uncomfortable stage where you feel quite bad about even looking, like you’re intruding on something deeply personal.

Maybe we really should all just… not watch. Let them work through whatever this is they’re going through in some kind of peace.

Instead, we’re making Ange Postecoglou our manager to watch, again, because it is just so horribly fascinating to see, in real time, something go horribly wrong that everyone knew would go horribly wrong in the exact way – on, if anything, an accelerated timeline – it is going horribly wrong.

 

Player to watch: Viktor Gyokeres

There’s something about Gyokeres that is just unbeatably Modern Football. Not him as a player, but as a concept. In Gyokeres we have the clearest example yet of a player who had been judged, weighed and measured before he arrived at Arsenal. Battle lines were drawn, a culture war declared, and nobody will budge.

He is either the final piece in the puzzle or a massive flop. No other outcome will be considered or tolerated, and most importantly nothing he actually does or doesn’t do on the pitch will shift anyone from the opinion that they formed and hardened and crystallised before he’d even worn the shirt.

Goals he does score are either given far greater significance than they truly merit, or are ignored altogether, depending on your position.

One criticism we’ve heard a bit already, and expect to hear more of, is that he scores the Wrong Goals. It’s entirely possible he’ll become the first Premier League flop to score 20 goals in his debut season.

It’s a clever ruse, because initially it sounds quite reasonable when a Troy Deeney or some other such loud radio opinion-haver says he needs to score in a ‘big game’ or that Arsenal didn’t sign him to score late gloss-adders in 5-0 wins over Leeds.

But it’s just guff, isn’t it? Sure, at some point it would be good to see him score in a ‘big game’ against ‘top opposition’. But the idea that Arsenal signed him specifically to do that and only that is, when given even a second’s actual thought, bumwash. Obvious bumwash at that.

And this weekend’s trip to Fulham is in fact a textbook example of precisely the kind of fixture they also really need him to make a difference.

Arsenal haven’t failed to win any of the last three league titles (only) because of not winning all the games against the best teams. It’s (also) because of points dropped at places like Fulham.

Arsenal haven’t won here in either of the last two seasons, and Fulham haven’t lost here this season. Something to bear in mind there after Gyokeres’ winning goal this weekend is airily dismissed a fortnight down the line as the wrong kind of goal by those who’ve already made up their minds.

 

Football League game to watch: QPR v Millwall

The fact the three teams promoted into last season’s Premier League and then instantly sent packing back to the Championship were so very wretched was disastrous for last season’s top-flight relegation battle, but is already proving a significant boon for this season’s Championship promotion fight.

Relegated teams should, very obviously, have a huge advantage when stepping back down in class. Off the field with your parachute payments and such, and on the field where even decimated squads will still contain the occasional gleam of Premier League sparkle.

But none of the three teams who went down last season are in any kind of position to now set about dominating the Championship, with the result that an already unpredictable division is now more wide open than usual.

Coventry and Middlesbrough are a pleasingly early Carling pair of potential Premier League returnees currently setting the pace, but there is only two points separating Leicester, who sit third despite themselves, and Bristol City down in tenth.

Between them sit a whole bunch of clubs trying to get back to the top flight after absences of various degrees and those hoping to enjoy a delicious foaming pint of Barclays for the very first time since football was invented all the way back in 1992.

The pick of Saturday’s lunchtime crop pits one from each camp against each other in a London derby as QPR host Millwall. Two places but a single point separate them going into the weekend, and for both sides there exists a tantalising chance to take first-mover’s advantage and jump through this currently tightly-packed bunch in and around the play-off spots.

 

European game to watch: Bayern Munich v Borussia Dortmund

Der Klassiker is always a key moment in any Bundesliga season, but this one already carries significant weight. It’s very early but still feels very correct to say this is a game that will tell us whether or not there is any prospect of an actual title fight in Germany this year, or simply a Bayern Munich procession.

Bayern have made a ludicrous start to the season, winning 10 straight games in all competitions and scoring a truly absurd amount of goals in the process. Luis Diaz has scored five goals in his first six Bundesliga games for the club, and that’s as many as anyone from any other club in the division has managed this season. It’s still not half as many as Harry Kane has plundered.

Only three of the other 17 Bundesliga clubs have managed more than the 11 goals Kane has to his name, and Dortmund with 12 just about join that collective.

More significantly, or at least Dortmund must hope, they have conceded only four goals in their six games. It’s not quite the unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, but it does represent a stiffer domestic challenge than a Bayern attack that has scored at least three times in each of its six straight league wins this season has thus far encountered.

A win for Dortmund closes the gap at the top of the table to a single point and makes things interesting. The far more likely outcome, another goal-laden Bayern victory featuring a Kane penalty or three, will see the champions move seven points clear of Dortmund, at least six clear of anyone else, and disappearing once again over the horizon.

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