Big Christmas Weekend: Chelsea v Aston Villa, Man City, Mason Mount, Thomas Frank | OneFootball

Boxing Day falling on a Friday may have robbed us of our God-given right as Englishmen to spend the day watching wall-to-wall top-flight football, but it’s still a pretty Big Christmas Weekend, we suppose.

The one game we are being allowed by the wokerati on Boxing Day is at least a good one, and the following couple of days do have some belters to be fair. Including – again, as should be law at this time of year – a couple of potential opportunities to deploy the word ‘sack’ in whimsical fashion to refer to both Santa’s preferred if archaic toy delivery method and the fate of a couple of under-fire managers.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, all right.

Game to watch: Chelsea v Aston Villa

Always looked like it would be the most significant game in the title race over the festive weekend, but only in the last few weeks has it become clear that this is because of Aston Villa’s involvement and not Chelsea’s.

It is, obviously, a huge test of Villa’s stickability; Chelsea may have meekly surrendered their own chances in self-fulfilling fashion once again, but they remain a tough test for a team trying to compete with two giants in Arsenal and Man City.

The actual dynamic of this Saturday evening affair will inevitably be coloured by what Man City and Arsenal themselves have done earlier in the day. Fair to say Villa would at this point settle for a retention of the status quo in terms of their gap to the top two.

And without wishing to pour any rain on Villa’s current parade, it does still bear mentioning that as the second half of the season pans out there is still the possibility/probability that Chelsea emerge as more significant rivals to Villa than the top two anyway in terms of Champions League qualification.

Villa currently lead Enzo Maresca’s side by seven points and while sprinting to keep up with the top two isn’t doing Unai and the lads any harm right now it does feel like a day where, even for a team with 11 wins from their last 12 Premier League games, a draw would be absolutely fine and not in any way necessarily a momentum killer.

Team to watch: Manchester City

Villa are obviously the best team in the country right now, but for the first time in a good while it’s looking like Man City might be second best. They’re certainly playing more convincing football than Arsenal right now, and have another chance to briefly leapfrog their main title rivals and put pressure on a potentially ticklish home game for Arsenal against a Brighton side who so often relish the chance to mess with the bigger boys.

But in order to apply that pressure City must take care of their own business against Sean Dyche’s Nottingham Forest, a team that can’t quite be described as resurgent but is definitely no longer the pushover of the brief but hilarious Angeball days.

They’ve been alternating between victory and defeat for the last six Premier League games, and the bad news for City is that they’ll arrive at the City Ground at the wrong point in that particular pattern.

The good news for City is that they aren’t currently alternating anything having won each of their last five Premier League games, the last three of them by 3-0 margins and with 17 goals in total across those five games. Which, even after the 3-0 paddling of Tottenham the other week, is still the total number of Premier League goals Forest have managed all season.

Player to watch: Mason Mount

We may only have one Premier League game on Boxing Day, because of woke, but it is at least a good one as the tentatively improving Man United take on a frustrating Newcastle side whose season still awaits any kind of real lift-off.

The big news for the home side, of course, is how they fare without Bruno Fernandes. He isn’t the actual most irreplaceable player in the league, because that probably is still just Erling Haaland because of sheer weight of numbers, but his combination of vital importance and until now impeccable reliability does give this some real heft.

This is a player who basically plays all of the football for Man United, and there’s a certain irony that his first vaguely serious injury in five years has come right at the start of the busiest time of the quietest season.

But every crisis is an opportunity, and now for the first time in his United career we get the chance to see Mason Mount cast in a starring rather than supporting role.

For him, the timing does seem rather good. He has in recent weeks been playing the best football he’s produced since leaving Chelsea and has already proved he can do a job playing alongside United’s undisputed star man.

Now he must show he can pull the strings in Bruno’s absence, or all the hints of recovery for both United and Mount himself over the last couple of months could be washed away before January is through.

Manager to watch: Thomas Frank

The current favourite in the Sack Race takes on the current favourite to replace him as Thomas Frank’s Tottenham travel to Crystal Palace for a real melon-twister of a game.

Oliver Glasner’s departure for somewhere shinier than Palace has long felt inevitable, but it wouldn’t do at all for them to lose him to somewhere as ropey as Spurs. So Palace need to tread carefully here, making sure to win, obviously, but not in such a way as to hasten Frank’s demise.

Luckily, Liverpool have given them the perfect blueprint for how to be alarmingly bad but still beat Spurs.

Frank is, clearly, in very deep trouble. The fallout from that vaguely absurd game against Liverpool in which Spurs played better with 10 men and then better still with nine means he has to try and engineer a result at Selhurst Park without both Xavi Simons and Cristian Romero. Both let him down badly on Saturday in inconsistent seasons, and this doesn’t look like a moment in which Spurs or Frank can afford to have both their attack and defence weakened in this manner.

Frank has already survived one encounter with his former club Brentford that had the possibility to end his Tottenham reign. But if he leaves Selhurst Park with the result we suspect, then the New Year trip to his old patch will carry old problems.

There was mitigation and even encouragement from the performance even in defeat against Liverpool, but that won’t fly in the next couple of games. He’s got to find a result in one of these two games surely. And even that may be no more than delaying the now inevitable.

Football League game to watch: Millwall v Ipswich

Unlike the ultra-woke, Christmas-cancelling Premier League, the Football League is delivering a full sack of Boxing Day fixtures to enjoy with your turkey sandwiches, Rennies and hangover.

Couple of tasty ones from the Championship promotion picture, too, with a couple of six-pointers among pairs of teams with their eyes on a play-off finish at worst.

Stoke v Preston is one, with the Potters looking to arrest their recent slide while for Preston the recent issue has been too many draws in a six-match unbeaten run.

The pick, though, looks to be Millwall v Ipswich, because third v sixth with third place up for grabs is always a particularly delicious dynamic for a Championship fixture at any time of the season.

European game to watch: Atalanta v Inter

God bless Serie A for carrying on even though it’s Christmas, and also this season for delivering what looks certain to be the best title race across Europe’s big leagues. We still here have a top five separated by just four points and after a bad couple of weeks for Bologna and Como it does seem now to have crystallised into a scrap between five big guns.

It’s currently all rather neat, with Inter top on 33 points and stacked up at one-point increments behind them come Milan, Napoli, Roma and Juventus.

The Christmas weekend doesn’t pit any of the contenders in direct conflict, but Inter’s trip to Atalanta does look as good a choice as any.

Essentially, absent a clear standout fixture for any of those title contenders, if you’re picking one game Inter are generally the safest bet on the entertainment front. They’ve conceded more goals than anyone else in the top eight bar Juventus (by a single goal) but with 34 goals in their 15 games thus far are 10 goals clear of anyone else.