Big Weekend: Arsenal v Chelsea, Tottenham, Haaland, Pereira, Der Klassiker | OneFootball

You’d better believe it’s another Big Weekend. They all are at this time, with The Business End Of The Season rapidly approaching.

It’s another big London derby for Arsenal, who will hope it goes much like last week’s. And another big London derby for Tottenham and Igor Tudor, who will hope it very much does not go like last week’s.

Erling Haaland returns to his home city, and we might even get a slightly clearer idea of whether Vitor Pereira’s start at Nottingham Forest has actually been particularly bouncy at all.

Game to watch: Arsenal v Chelsea

For the second week running, Arsenal face the prospect of having to respond in a Super Sunday London derby to whatever pressure Man City have applied on Saturday evening.

There’s good news and bad news for the Gunners beyond that, though. The good news is that they won’t have to spend this weekend fighting a bottle-based narrative. The bad news is that they don’t get to play Spurs. Particularly distressing for Ebere Eze, we imagine.

What they get instead is Chelsea. Now there are two key things to note about Chelsea at this time. They are definitely better than Spurs, but also maybe by not that much. Certainly, Arsenal ought to have few enough problems sorting out a side that had won four games in a row to seemingly take control of their Champions League qualification bid only to then come unstuck in consecutive home games against Leeds and, worse, Burnley.

The piddling away of four points in those two games, both of which Chelsea led, could be costly indeed for the Champions League chasers given a ticklish upcoming run of league games that includes not only Arsenal this weekend but Aston Villa, Newcastle, Everton, Man City and Man United by about mid-April.

Arsenal meanwhile will be less keen for this one to so accurately follow the reverse fixture as last weekend’s trip to Tottenham did, with the Gunners only managing a 1-1 draw against a Chelsea team that spent most of the game with 10 men after Moises Caicedo lost the run of himself at Stamford Bridge back in November.

Team to watch: Tottenham

Now the work really begins for Igor Tudor. The North London Derby was a bit of a free hit, but it was also f*cking grim and did appear to leave the latest poor bastard to have stumbled blinking and confused into the Tottenham hotseat realising just how big a sh*tshow he’s let himself be talked into.

But he’s also had another full week with his players and doesn’t have to play Arsenal again, which is definitely a boon. It’s also very obviously not (yet) a win-or-bust situation for Spurs, although that day grows uncomfortably close with the gap over 18th-placed West Ham having withered away from 13 points to four over recent weeks.

What this game does represent is an uncomfortably massive moment in Spurs’ season. If they can’t get a win – or at the very, very least a point and halfway-convincing overall performance – then the hopes pinned on a new-manager bounce will begin to evaporate and things could get very ugly very fast.

Spurs’ situation is a bleak one. They are a terrible team in horrible form with a nightmarish injury crisis and a slightly confused looking new manager. It has every chance of ending in a previously unthinkable catastrophe.

But there are also reasons for some optimism. That the returns of players as underwhelming as Pedro Porro and Kevin Danso is such big news for Spurs is damningly revealing in itself, but they are crucial players to have back. And more so now under Tudor than they would have been under Thomas Frank.

It’s a fair sign of just how fast and chaotically the wheel turns at Spurs, but worth remembering now that when Porro arrived at Spurs three years ago it was to play as an attack-minded right wing-back in Antonio Conte’s 3-4-3 having played a starring role in Ruben Amorim’s version at Sporting.

His expected return from injury this weekend to take that job in Tudor’s slightly more 3-5-2-flavoured iteration from young midfielder Archie Gray really should make a noticeable difference. Porro can be a frustrating flatter-to-deceive sort, but he does have crossing ability in his locker as well as a knack for a diagonal ball to find midfield runners.

The return of Danso gives Tudor another chance to put a round peg in a round hole by the simple delights of having three centre-backs to pick in a formation that requires three centre-backs. The knock-on effect of being able to pick a third centre-back to be third centre-back and a right wing-back to play right wing-back is that Joao Palhinha and Gray now bolster his options for a midfield that was so alarmingly overrun in the NLD last weekend.

What we should get on Sunday, with the slightly less dire squad restraints Tudor will now be working with, is a clearer example of how and how well and indeed if Tudor’s approach will work over the perilous months ahead. It seems very hard to predict, a sense only heightened by it just always being impossible to know what you might get from Fulham one week to the next anyway.

Player to watch: Erling Haaland

Haaland returns to the city of his birth this weekend, looking to help find a way past Leeds’ newly resolute five-man defence and help get himself out of one of those (relative) mid-season funks of his.

Haaland has a bit of a habit of this during his time in England. It is all very, very relative; had any other striker in the Premier League scored only three goals in the year approaching the end of February you’d hardly notice. But with Haaland every blank feels conspicuous. Last weekend against Newcastle he even turned provider by digging out a dinked little cross for Nico O’Reilly to decisively head home in what looked like a scene from a wildly misjudged body-swap comedy.

Two of Haaland’s three Premier League goals this calendar year have been from the penalty spot and while we never like to join the ranks of those who insist they shouldn’t count for some reason – especially when one of those two penalties was the dramatic winner at Liverpool – it would be nice for City to get their main man back once again scoring more regularly in more different ways as the title race takes shape ahead of the final run-in.

Manager to watch: Vitor Pereira

A curious start to life for the latest Nottingham Forest manager. There has been a new-manager bounce of sorts but… it kind of hasn’t really got them anywhere. A 3-0 win over Fenerbahce in the Europa League play-off round was a fine start, sure, but Forest then made harder work of the second leg than they wanted or needed to.

Defeat on the night in that one followed a late defeat to Liverpool and a nagging sense of opportunity lost.

If West Ham can do to a stuttering Liverpool this weekend what Forest could not last weekend, then Pereira will begin just his second game as Forest manager at Brighton already in the bottom three. Just the prospect alone should be enough to focus minds, as should the fact that a Forest win on the south coast not only significantly improves their own prospects but also stops Brighton pulling away from the relegation squabble altogether.

Football League game to watch: Cambridge United v MK Dons

A trip down to League Two this week because why not? This one pits second v third in a key clash in the promotion race, and also two teams bang in form.

Cambridge have won nine of their last 11 league games and lost only one since October – a rogue bad afternoon at relegation-threatened Harrogate. The Dons have won six and drawn three since losing narrowly to Colchester on New Year’s Day.

European game to watch: Borussia Dortmund v Bayern Munich

Dortmund are just about clinging to Bayern’s coat-tails at the top of the Bundesliga but won’t be hitting this Klassiker feeling tip-top about life after dropping points last weekend at RB Leipzig and then having their pants pulled down spectacularly by Atalanta in the Champions League punishment round after a 2-0 first-leg win seemed to have set them up nicely to progress.

Having already been knocked out of the Pokal by Leverkusen, defeat this weekend would effectively be a season-ender for Dortmund before we’ve even kicked February into touch.