Big Weekend: Man United v Brighton, Thomas Frank, Chelsea, Gabriel Jesus, Saudi Clasico | OneFootball

It might be a week later than is correct and proper, but it’s still FA Cup third-round weekend and one could, if one were so inclined, spend pretty much the entire weekend watching nothing but football.

Via the combination of vast swathes of televised cup games, and the Women’s Super League, and the Football League, and the assorted European leagues now back in full swing, and AFCON and assorted international youth action, you really are pretty much set.

There’s even the A-League for the night owls who want something to watch at ungodly hours now the Ashes is, mercifully, over.

It is, inevitably though, the FA Cup that dominates our thoughts.

Game to watch: Man United v Brighton

Who knows who will actually be in the dugout for Manchester United by the time Sunday afternoon rolls around, but it’s probably going to be a former United man who played under Sir Alex Ferguson, because remaining in deep and perpetual thrall to the Cult of Ferg has gone so well up to now.

Will it be Darren Fletcher? Ole Gunnar Solskjaer? Michael Carrick? Solskjaer and Carrick? All bloody three of them and maybe Steve Bruce as well because why not? Who knows. Certainly not us, that’s for sure.

What we do know is that this is a choppy little fixture for Man United and whichever of Fergie’s disciples happen(s) to be in charge on the day. Having gone out of the Carabao at the earliest possible opportunity via that infamous disaster at Grimsby and having failed to qualify for Europe after the even more embarrassing act of losing an actual final to actual Spurs, United now face the very real prospect of the smallest possible season.

That comes with some perks, of course, but is just not really the done thing when This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About. If they come unstuck against draw specialists Brighton at Old Trafford this weekend – and United’s win over the Seagulls this season snapped a three-game losing home streak against them – it’ll be a potless 40-game season for a once proud club.

What is left of the season will be spent on a probably unsuccessful bid to achieve Champions League football under some combination of caretakers and interims. It’s no life, that, is it?

As for Brighton, they join your Evertons and your Villas and your Forests among the more conspicuous remaining trophy-dodgers after last season’s astonishing run of success for others of that ilk like Palace and Newcastle and Spurs.

Feels like we say this every single season and it never ever happens, but the FA Cup surely presents a wonderful opportunity for Brighton to do something genuinely staggering. Especially when they’re so safely ensconced as the most mid-table side in the Premier League’s most mid-table season ever.

If nothing else, the sight of Palace winning it must have stirred something.

Team to watch: Chelsea

From one chaotic Big Six club to another as Chelsea begin their new project under Liam Rosenior having used all their expert boardroom negotiating skills to lure him away from Strasbourg. What a coup that is, by the way.

Rosenior was in the directors’ box to watch Calum McFarlane’s side slip to a pretty ropey 2-1 defeat at Fulham in midweek, but now starts life on his shiny new six-year (stop laughing, please) contract with a short trip to Charlton.

It’s been 19 years since Chelsea last played Charlton, and the winning goal that day came from a certain Frank Lampard which just keeps the whole manager narrative ticking along nicely.

Fair to say this looks like the easier of the two early cup dates on Rosenior’s immediate to-do list, with Arsenal up next in the Carabao Cup semi-final first leg. It’s a relatively gentle start that clearly comes with only one acceptable outcome.

That makes it all the more exciting, though, and there’s no doubt a certain wild unpredictability crept into Chelsea’s football during the final weeks of Enzo Maresca’s increasingly curious tenure and even across McFarlane’s two games.

Even harder to predict what on earth Chelsea might serve up here under a new manager with so little experience of his new level, but the fact it feels roughly equally plausible for Chelsea to go full banana skin as it does for them to win 8-0 or something suggests it should be worth tuning in.

Player to watch: Gabriel Jesus

We’re assuming he starts for Arsenal at Portsmouth with Viktor Gyokeres back in the XI for the Chelsea Carabao semi-final clash in midweek, but honestly who knows now? If we’re wrong, just imagine we put Gyokeres here instead.

It will be a big chance for whoever gets the start anyway, with Gyokeres’ already much-discussed disappearing act in several games reaching new lows in an eight-touch effort in the pouring rain of the very dampest 0-0 squib against Liverpool.

Jesus came on late in the second half and certainly helped liven things up, having Arsenal’s first attempt on goal of the second half just as the clock ticked past 90 minutes and into injury time.

One imagines that chances will be slightly more forthcoming for whoever is in at Portsmouth as Arsenal embark upon the fourth prong of what is quite probably only now days away from being considered a genuine quadruple tilt even though quadruple tilts by English teams absolutely never, ever amount to anything.

To be honest, Arsenal’s best bet might be to get knocked out of this and just win the other three rather than risk spreading themselves too thinly. But are they willing to listen to such good advice and simply win the Premier League, Champions League and Carabao or like Icarus will they fly too close to the sun and chase the impossible?

Manager to watch: Thomas Frank

It’s all about optics, isn’t it? The photos of Thomas Frank wandering gormlessly around Bournemouth looking gormless with a little Arsenal-branded coffee cup in his hand already have a Steve McClaren wally-with-the-brolly quality to them. When – and it is surely now when not if – the axe finally falls on this doomed experiment, those are the pictures that will accompany this story’s telling.

There is a profound Spurs quality to the absurdity of it all, of course. The series of events that leads to it even being possible just feels like something that only happens and could only happen to Spurs.

But also… consider the reverse. Imagine Mikel Arteta was ‘caught’ supping from a Spurs cup. It would all feel very different, wouldn’t it? The memes would all be about ‘drinking Spurs tears’ and such. Even a few short months ago, this daft little incident happening exactly as it now has would have produced many banters about the impressiveness of finding a cup with Arsenal’s name on it. How we’d have laughed.

Point is, it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s all a projection. But a powerful one nevertheless, one that comes to symbolise everything for a manager who arrived as a details man and now can’t even spot a big ol’ Arsenal badge on a little coffee cup.

What actually does matter, we fear, is that Frank has started talking complete b*llocks. Again, pretty understandable that anyone tasked with managing Spurs eventually finds themselves doing so, but it’s not a sign of anything good.

Consider this astonishing guff.

Now that’s the sort of thing you might normally expect to find written on a toilet wall, but written in sh*t. Or worse, on LinkedIn. Or worse still, on a Jake Humphrey podcast.

But here’s the thing that’s even worse than talking like a Jake Humphrey podcast guest – if you can even imagine such a concept. It doesn’t even actually work on its own batsh*t terms.

First of all, if you’re building anything in a storm then you’ve already f*cked it by failing to adequately prepare yourself. Build the windmill before the storm arrives, if anything.

But also… Frank is no windmill-builder. He has spent recent weeks complaining about the fans, repeatedly pointing out that Spurs finished 17th last season as if that is normal or acceptable rather than the specific thing he has been tasked with changing rather than aiming to repeat, and noting that January is a very difficult month.

The storm has arrived and he’s been busy building crappy little fences and drinking Arsenal coffee.

Anyway, on Saturday his dreary Spurs team take on an Aston Villa team that’s already beaten them once at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium this season and will fully expect to do so again. And with that will go the last lingering hope of Spurs enjoying any escape from the drudgery of trying to make sure a bad season doesn’t become a truly catastrophic one.

Barring, of course, a Champions League knockout run of such vanishing unlikelihood as to make the 2019 effort look prosaic.

There is no avoiding the thought that Thomas Frank’s fictitious windmill is about to get all spattered with some more very real sh*t.

Football League game to watch: Stockport v Huddersfield

An inevitably reduced League One and Two schedule with cup runs still ongoing all over the shop, but that doesn’t deny us a pretty big game in the keenly-contested League One promotion race as Stockport and Huddersfield – separated by no points but two places in the play-off spots – clash at Edgeley Park.

Stockport have been hit and miss since going out of the FA Cup on penalties to League Two Cambridge, with as many wins as defeats in seven subsequent games while Huddersfield have put a four-match losing run in autumn – including a 2-1 defeat to Stockport at the John Smith’s – behind them but remain too prone to draws despite losing just two of their last 12 league games.

European game to watch: Barcelona v Real Madrid

What better way to round out a weekend full of all manner of cup magic than by tuning into the final of the Spanish Super Cup, which will be played between Barcelona and Real Madrid now the formalities of getting rid of semi-finalists Atletico Madrid and Athletic Club have been taken care of.

Admittedly, you might argue that what would be better would be doing all of the above but watching it happen in Spain rather than Saudi Arabia but there’s not much we can do about that at this time.

Third plays fourth as these two try desperately to keep up with the ferocious pace currently being set by Man City at the top of the table and all too aware that neither of them have yet shaken off Tottenham in what is for now looking like a four-way battle also involving fallen perennial champions Chelsea for two Champions League spots.