Big Weekend: Man United v Liverpool, Tottenham, Viktor Gyokeres, Andoni Iraola, Oliver Glasner | OneFootball

It’s a lovely long Big Weekend, with games from Friday night right through to treats in both the afternoon and evening on Bank Holiday Monday – times when, really, you should actually be watching the snooker.

We’ve been very good and restricted ourselves to the traditional Big Weekend remit of Saturday and Sunday. And there’s still absolutely loads of good stuff.

Man United v Liverpool is rarely one to be sniffed at, while we’re approaching the very last chance if Spurs are planning a great escape with their dwindling supply of remaining footballers.

Game to watch: Man United v Liverpool

It’s the game to watch because of course it is. It’s Manchester United v Liverpool. It’s also something of an oddity because it is about as low-key as Manchester United v Liverpool can be. Both are snug and safe and sound in the Champions League spots. Neither are remotely involved in the title race. Both believe that will change next season. Both are very likely wrong.

But this is still Manchester United Football Club v Liverpool Football Club We’re Talking About. And if it’s anything like the reverse fixture back in October nobody will have any complaints about the fact it doesn’t really mean all that much beyond the potential for a bit of final-position bragging rights.

When Manchester United grabbed a dramatic Harry Maguire winner in a 2-1 win at Anfield six months ago it was hard to imagine this would be the situation for the return fixture, with United looking down on the defending champions.

But with both Liverpool and Man United safe in the top five, the real significance of this game could come for whoever finishes in sixth when the Premier League music stops. If Aston Villa win the Europa League and finish precisely fifth, then sixth place will earn a Champions League place for next season.

What’s most fun about all that is that it’s not yet entirely clear a) who that sixth-placed team will be or b) what specific result is best for them here. But it’s probably a Liverpool win.

Team to watch: Tottenham

What’s left of them anyway. Guglielmo Vicario, Mohammed Kudus, Cristian Romero, Pape Sarr, Destiny Udogie, Dominic Solanke and Xavi Simons would represent a fair list of injury setbacks to suffer in a season. For Spurs, those are merely the players to suffer new injuries or season-ending setbacks to existing ones since Roberto De Zerbi took over as manager one month ago.

Spurs obviously don’t deserve much sympathy for the largely self-inflicted mess in which they find themselves, but De Zerbi has certainly had a crash course in Spursy.

He has, though, steered them to a Premier League win after an absurd 118-day wait. Can it be a turning point? It kind of has to be, but doesn’t really feel like one.

The sense you get is that had Spurs held on a week earlier against Brighton, in a game where they played genuinely well for extended periods of time against a quite good team, that really might have proved something of a launchpad.

A scruffy and deeply unconvincing win at relegated Wolves in which Spurs created almost nothing and lost two of the vanishingly few remaining players capable of creating anything to season-ending injuries? Not so much.

The Brighton game did offer glimpses of a different Spurs, a better Spurs. But the Wolves game had almost nothing to distinguish it from the end days of Thomas Frank or the entirety of the ill-starred Igor Tudor era.

Apart from the result. And maybe that will be enough. Maybe Spurs really were a team that just needed the old struggling striker’s proverbial ‘one to go in off his backside’. Maybe they will now go on a run. There are certainly worse times to play Aston Villa away than after a bruising Europa League semi-final first-leg defeat at Nottingham Forest in which they suffered the odd injury setback of their own.

But Villa’s Europa League run has also shuttled this game to Sunday evening, by which time Spurs could be five points behind West Ham and firmly in the last-chance saloon.

Manager to watch: Iraola and Glasner

A curious spectacle indeed at the Vitality this weekend, with a pair of managers on their way out clashing as Bournemouth take on Crystal Palace.

It’s always a curious situation anyway when a manager announces he will be leaving at the end of the season. Especially as, in Oliver Glasner’s case, the decision seems to be born of frustration with his situation rather than a desire to take a next step as it is with Andoni Iraola.

Wherein another curiosity for this specific clash. Glasner and Palace have, rather impressively, turned their season around when it could have unravelled completely with the sale of Marc Guehi and the announcement Glasner himself would also leave at the end of the season. At that point it seemed odds-against he would even last that long.

Let’s not forget that back in January when Glasner announced he was leaving, Palace were only a point above Spurs in the table. It could all have looked very different for a team and manager now within touching distance of adding a first piece of continental silverware to their first major domestic honour and send Glasner out on an extraordinary high.

Iraola doesn’t have those baubles to point to, but has nevertheless carried Bournemouth to the brink of something no less stunning this season. They are seventh in the league right now, and just a point behind sixth and with it the very real chance of Champions League football, never mind Europa.

It does feel like Iraola is the man more likely to be coveted by the very biggest clubs this summer, but both can look back with enormous pride on astonishing bodies of work with clubs who have never seen days like these.

Player to watch: Viktor Gyokeres

The fixture list is a mischievous beast and has seen fit to allow Arsenal the chance to move six points clear but not really. Fulham at home will be Arsenal’s second game since Man City briefly knocked them off top spot with victory at Burnley, and even with games in hand a six-point gap at this stage of the season has to offer some kind of scoreboard pressure even to a man as hardened to title battles as Pep Guardiola.

But first Arsenal actually need to get themselves six points clear on Saturday evening against a Fulham side who, like almost everyone else not actually relegated or in danger of being so, still have a decent shot at European football next season.

Key to that may well be Viktor Gyokeres, whose impressive all-round display of the forward’s art against Atletico Madrid felt both timely and vital. Not least for the fact it came in a game where Julian Alvarez, an obvious and known Arsenal target, was doing much the same thing at the other end.

Gyokeres has clearly warmed to his task as the season has progressed. But he has still only occasionally looked like the all-action, all-conquering striker Arsenal need and thought they’d got.

On Wednesday night, he was that striker. He ran at Atletico’s defence, he held the ball up, he brought others into the game. He did the dirty work that was inevitably going to be necessary against Diego Simeone’s dark artists extraordinaire; he showed the wit to draw a foul and the gumption to dispatch a penalty.

We’re not sure he’s ever played better than that for the Gunners, and what has been an interesting first season for him at the Emirates still has every chance of ending in spectacular glory.

Especially if he can get them those six points clear.

Football League game to watch: Ipswich v QPR

You can usually rely on the Football League to deliver top-tier late-season drama, and the Championship’s final day this weekend has got plenty to offer. Coventry are very promoted indeed, but we still don’t know who will join them: Ipswich (81pts), Millwall (80pts) or Middlesbrough (79pts)

It’s just about a three-way battle, albeit with Middlesbrough’s hopes firmly in the slim-to-none camp. They not only have to win at Wrexham – who have their own play-off-securing business to attend to – but hope that both Ipswich and Millwall come unstuck.

Ipswich, as the team in possession, have the simplest task: beat QPR, who are very mid-table indeed and have lost their last three games, and the job is done. But you sense they will need that win, with Millwall ready to pounce on any slip as they take on already-relegated Oxford.

Should Ipswich make it – either this weekend or via the play-offs if need be – that would make it three promotions and a relegation in the last four seasons for the Tractor Boys. Not a bad effort really for a team that spent 17 straight seasons in the second tier at the start of the century.

European game to watch: Espanyol v Real Madrid

We’re going right ahead here and assuming Barcelona beat Osasuna on Saturday. Should they do so, Real Madrid will have to win at Barca’s neighbours Espanyol to keep a long-decided title race technically just about alive for one more week.

It does matter, because next weekend it’s El Clasico. Which raises a couple of obviously delicious possibilities. First, Barcelona winning the title this weekend and Real Madrid (not for the first time) having to come up with a reason not to give them the traditional guard of honour.

The other possibility, perhaps even better, is that the two giants match each other’s results this weekend leaving Barcelona needing only a draw against their arch rivals next weekend to set the champagne corks popping.