Big Midweek: Aston Villa v Chelsea, Liverpool, Igor Tudor and Kai Havertz | OneFootball

Defeat to Chelsea after the Wolves disaster could spell the end of Aston Villa’s Champions League hope.

We also eagerly await Igor Tudor’s next madness after losing to Crystal Palace on Thursday and are very much looking forward to the tiki-taka football we can presumably expect from Arne Slot’s Liverpool after he hit out at the lack of excitement in the Premier League.

Kai Havertz x Viktor Gyokeres could offer Arsenal the attacking boost they need and there’s a promotion six-pointer in the Championship. It’s another Big ol’ Midweek.

Game to watch: Aston Villa v Chelsea

A 2-0 defeat to Wolves is criminal; there’s no getting around that. Aston Villa played them at a point in the season in which they are at least a functioning football team – who had very recently taken points off Arsenal as well as Nottingham Forest – but a team vying for Champions League football simply cannot be the second team to lose to the rock-bottom side after 28 games. Confidence must be at a record low after that.

Unai Emery and his players have done remarkably well to be where they are now given the well-documented lack of money spent on this squad and the injuries they’ve suffered, which are now very evidently taking their toll. Strip any team of their starting midfield three and they would struggle in a similar manner.

Few would now give Villa much hope of finishing in the top five because of those injuries; lose to Chelsea on Wednesday and it will feel like the nail in the coffin in spite of them currently being six points clear of the Blues.

Villa do though have around a 25 per cent chance of playing against ten men for a healthy portion of the game to redress the balance and can probably also rely on Robert Sanchez to play his part in setting fire to Chelsea’s Champions League qualification chances.

We wonder if Arne Slot would have felt quite so emboldened to question the excitement of the Premier League on the back of his side’s harrowingly awful display in victory over Nottingham Forest rather than after a 5-2 win over West Ham.

Our “football hearts” also don’t like the heavy reliance on set-pieces, as displayed to the nth degree in Arsenal’s 2-1 win over Chelsea on Sunday. Like Slot, we see “the Barcelona team of 10, 15 years ago” as the pinnacle of football.

But it’s a bold move from a manager whose title-winning team frequently took their foot of the gas in games last term and who reverted to a horribly functional and turgid style this season to avoid the sack to insist that “most of the games I see in the Premier League are not for me a joy to watch”. Have a look in the mirror, mate.

Fortunately for all of us Premier League fans starved of tiki-taka football, Liverpool have a perfect opportunity to showcase their world-class pass-and-move football through a game against Wolves on Tuesday before another game against Wolves in the FA Cup on Friday. The mind boggles at the joy we’re about to experience through Slot’s irrepressible Reds.

Manager to watch: Igor Tudor

Is the institution of Tottenham Hotspur Football Cub’s sole purpose now to provide joy for all but the stakeholders in Tottenham Hotspur football club?

They’ve been doing a fine job of delighting the masses for a while now but for most of that time there was at least something for the Spurs fans to cling to – they won an actual trophy a little over nine months ago. But in hiring Igor Tudor in the midst of a relegation battle, they’ve arguably taken the bit too far.

In 17 days Tudor’s Tottenham have been battered by an Arsenal side at their lowest ebb, they’ve been entirely outclassed by Fulham and the man himself has questioned the integrity of a Premier League referee, called a Premier League footballer a “cheat” and insisted his team is “lacking” in all areas of the pitch while wondering if they have the “brains” to put things right.

He’s “amazed” by quite how sh*t Tottenham are, just as we are by his decision to voice that amazement in public before the visit of Crystal Palace on Thursday to the fortress that isn’t the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Sacked after three games? Cristian Stellini lasted four and won four points in his first two games.

Player to watch: Kai Havertz

Eberechi Eze was back to his inert self against Chelsea after a second day in the sun this season courtesy of Tottenham and looks more and more like a player for next season if he’s to make a consistent mark for Arsenal at all.

And the promising link-up play between Havertz and Viktor Gyokeres, albeit from a very small sample size, is something Mikel Arteta has got to give a chance to in what remains of this season. Arsenal cannot rely on good fortune and a huge disparity in the quality of two goalkeepers, as was the case against Chelsea, if they’re going to win the Premier League title.

While Eze has been a passenger for the vast majority of this season, with large parts of games going by without him making a mark or even getting on the ball enough to show he’s actually playing, Havertz is perennially involved. The German is also a big-game player and all the games are big from now on.

EFL game to watch: Ipswich Town v Hull City

Level on points in fifth and sixth in the Championship, though Ipswich have a game in hand, and victory for either on Tuesday will see them move above Millwall into third and keep touch with Middlesbrough in the second automatic promotion spot behind Frank Lampard’s runaway Coventry kids.

Both teams head into the clash on the back of consecutive defeats but Ipswich will feel confident with home advantage and after beating Hull 2-0 in the return fixture back in November.