Big Weekend: Man United v Man City, Coventry, Roberto De Zerbi, Martin Odegaard | OneFootball

No doubt at all about the game of the weekend. It’s the Manchester derby.

It’s a game that could be a litmus test for where both are, which would frankly be helpful because right now we don’t really have any firm idea about whether either of them are any good or not.

Arsenal and their captain Martin Odegaard are definitely good. And we will need to see some evidence very soon from across North London that Spurs can at least strive for basic competence lest Roberto De Zerbi find himself in a pickle. Just a goal would be something, lads.

Game to watch: Manchester United v Manchester City The first proper derby of the Premier League season arrives at an interesting moment for football in Manchester.

It’s a game that should tell us a fair bit about what both these teams are about this season, and that’s welcome because right now we’re not at all sure what the answer to that question is for either of them.

City have three wins from three in the Premier League and are up and running with three points away from home against Porto in the Champions League. That’s a good start for Enzo Maresca and the lads, you can’t pretend it isn’t. We’ve tried, but you can’t.

Just doesn’t quite pass the sniff test, though, does it? Not been convincing, has it?

It’s not exactly like Liverpool’s misleading start last season, but it does have the whiff of something that could be similarly deceptive.

They’ve only really played well against a Crystal Palace side teetering on the very precipice of You Fear For Them status and quite possibly only avoiding it due to the good fortune of playing a Fulham side that are already there.

City rode their luck to an alarming degree against Coventry, and then did something pretty similar in midweek, taking their foot off the gas quite disconcertingly after going 1-0 up against a mediocre iteration of Porto.

And we’re even less sure what United might be capable of this season. They’ve conceded two goals in each of their three Premier League games to date, which would be bad enough even if those games hadn’t been against a pair of promoted teams and a David Moyes Everton side that has had almost all the joy surgically removed from it.

They too won in midweek, spanking Sabah 4-0 on their return to the Champions League. It was exactly the kind of routine, straightforward evening United needed – not least to mitigate the 48-hour headstart City had in their derby preparations – but against such limited opposition it’s as meaningless to suggest United have found form as it would be to say it of a side easing through round two of the Carabao.

Which all means everything’s perfectly set up to draw wide-ranging and dramatically firm conclusions about both these question-mark-addled sides, and then spend the rest of the season watching said conclusions look further and further from the mark. Can’t wait.

Team to watch: Coventry City Ever since the fixture list was announced for the Premier League season, we’ve been trying to decide whether getting Arsenal and Man City within the first three games was handy because it gets them out of the way while you’re trying to get a new squad to gel anyway, or a problem because it largely ruled out the chance of a fast start that might just have enough momentum to sustain an unlikely survival charge.

Starting to look very much like the latter, despite an admirable effort in defeat at City. Losing to Hull, who had started the season with a bang against United rather than Coventry’s whimper at Arsenal, felt like confirmation that a nice easy start is preferable if you can begin to ride the wave.

No use thinking about it much further, though. Coventry are where they are and must avoid becoming talked about in concerned terms featuring words like ‘adrift’ and ‘gap’ and ‘absolute sh*t but it’s definitely not Frank’s fault’.

It’s Brighton next, which isn’t remotely easy, but it’s a home game against non-elite opposition and Coventry are going to have to start picking up something from games like this sometime soon.

Manager to watch: Roberto De Zerbi Already feels like he might be ready to explode after Spurs’ winless and vexingly lifeless start to the season.

The news of Mykhailo Mudryk’s ankle injury won’t have improved his darkening mood, with De Zerbi’s public pronouncements of acceptance of the fact he needs to follow orders from the medical staff already starting to sound deeply unconvincing.

Spurs have been in a state of largely constant injury crisis across the last two years, which they’ve also largely spent mired in just about every other kind of crisis. It does mean the caution the club have erred on the side of with every player through the summer and now into the season is understandable.

But we do wonder if it might also have been unhelpful. There’s just something all a little bit self-fulfilling about it all. Spurs have been so careful with so many players that they’ve crisised themselves. It’s a self-crisising. They’re obviously a new-look team, but they’re also one that looks so far short of Premier League readiness collectively and individually. They look like they need a pre-season, because they spent pre-season too scared to actually pick players who needed a pre-season often enough and for long enough.

How, for instance, does Sandro Tonali – a man who had no World Cup exertion to weary him through the summer – look so much more knackered than those whose summers weren’t spent on the beach?

And Spurs have still picked up injuries anyway. James Maddison knacked himself on the opening day of the season. Mudryk is now out until, according to reports, the other side of the international break. We all wait eagerly to find out which international break. Savio played 20 minutes against Charlton in the Carabao and then had to miss a Premier League game because of muscle fatigue.

It all seems muddled and cautious and indicative of a club that is absolutely terrified. And De Zerbi isn’t really helping to alter that perception.

He sealed Spurs’ frankly unlikely survival last season with a narrow, fraught 1-0 win over Everton and how he and they could do with the same this weekend to at least breathe some kind of life into a campaign where Spurs seem scared of their own shadows.

Player to watch: Martin Odegaard The Premier League’s best player this season and, along with Kai Havertz in absurdly inventive and impish mood, the key reason why Arsenal already look like being a far more watchable while equally effective team this season.

Odegaard, who came in for plenty of criticism last season at a time when he was demonstrably not fully fit, has been reborn this season.

Everything Arsenal do as an attacking team goes through him. And now he’s also started scoring goals every week, which we have to say is something we would absolutely encourage him to continue with. More players should, to be honest.

This weekend he and Arsenal travel to Sunderland looking to continue their flawless start to the season at the scene of one of the last campaign’s rare blights. They’ve already put one such irritation to bed this season with a win at Villa; you’d expect similar again here.

Football League game to watch: West Brom v QPR No early Premier League game on Saturday means a chance for the Championship to strut its stuff, and a game between two of the early-season top four looks like the very ideal kind of thing.

West Brom go into matchday seven but may well have been overtaken by West Ham on Friday night before perhaps eyeing up a continuation of their own recent trend for 1-0 victories.

European game to watch: Levante v Barcelona If in doubt then go for Barcelona, is very much the blueprint for this section at this time. There are no guarantees of entertainment and goals anywhere, of course, but Barca are currently about as close as you can get.

They’ve played five games this season, and scored five goals in four of them as Raphinha, Lamine Yamal and an absolutely delighted Anthony Gordon start the season having a rare old time of it.

Gordon is yet to score but already has five assists just four games into his La Liga career, while Raphinha and Lamine Yamal have between them scored a vaguely ludicrous 13 goals already this season.