Big Weekend: Chelsea v Arsenal, Tottenham, Arne Slot, Michael Keane | OneFootball

Arsenal can take another big step on their eerily serene march towards what is apparently an increasingly inevitable and straight-forward Premier League title with current nearest pursuers Chelsea in the Gunners’ sights this weekend.

Elsewhere, serenity – eerie or otherwise – is in shorter supply at Tottenham and Liverpool, who could both do with victory over Fulham and West Ham respectively to ease the pressure on managers who are currently becoming beleaguered at an alarming rate.

And at the Hill Dickinson it’s all eyes on Michael Keane to see if he can avoid getting lamped by a team-mate this weekend.

That sounds like a Big Weekend to us.

Game to watch: Chelsea v Arsenal

Depending on how the weekend’s earlier games have panned out, Arsenal’s short trip to Stamford Bridge will give them the chance to open a lead over the rest of at least seven and perhaps as many as nine points.

If they can beat a team that is, and we’re not quite sure how this has happened, their nearest current challengers then it really will start to become very hard indeed to see how anyone stops them ending what would be a 22-year wait for a Premier League title in May. It really does already look very much like the only team that can stop Arsenal doing that is Arsenal themselves.

It won’t be Liverpool. It almost certainly won’t be Man City. And that takes out the only two teams who’ve won the league since Chelsea themselves back in 2017. And the Premier League feels a very different place now than it did back then.

You’d like to think Chelsea will at least make things harder for Arsenal than Spurs did last weekend, but Arsenal’s current imperious form does lead one to suspect another victory for the leaders is on the cards and the four-team Premier League title race we dreamed of – demanded, even – really could be down to just one team before the Christmas decorations go up.

Team to watch: Tottenham

Meanwhile, in the other half of North London, something stirs. The capitulation in the North London Derby might – might – have finally caused something to click in Thomas Frank’s brain. He might have just realised that losing without even trying do anything but will get him sacked a lot quicker than losing but at least looking like you occupy a universe in which that might not happen.

It is profoundly and almost unimprovably Spurs to be able to say – and entirely mean it – that a 5-3 defeat in a game you’ve led twice was genuinely encouraging. But the 5-3 defeat at PSG in a game Spurs led twice really was genuinely encouraging.

We’re not quite sure where Frank plucked his wingless wonders midfield diamond formation from, but it worked really rather well for extremely long periods of the game in Paris.

The goals Spurs did concede in that game – and yes, there were an awful lot of them – came from individual rather than systemic errors. Spurs had held PSG at arm’s length alarmingly easy until Vitinha slapped home an equaliser off the underside of the bar from long range just before the break.

It all went quite dramatically downhill in the second half, but it never felt like the system was at fault. It, quite simply, never felt like Arsenal felt. Like a game surrendered before a ball had been kicked.

On another day with that exact performance, Spurs could easily have left Paris with a point. Three, even. There is no universe or dimension or timeline real or imagined where they leave Arsenal with anything other than a beating.

Arsenal and PSG away in consecutive games was always likely to end badly, but the hope must be that a penny has dropped for Frank after the contrasting reaction to contrasting approaches yielding, on this occasion, identical results.

But what we still don’t know is how Frank will apply what (we hope) he’s learned from those away games to the more prosaic but apparently for Spurs equally difficult task of picking up points from relatively far easier home games.

They are still without a Premier League home win since the opening weekend, their record at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium across more than a year now reaching an absurd three wins in 20 Premier League games.

What happens next against a Fulham team still down in 15th but showing signs of life after two wins in their last three games feels like it’s of enormous importance to Spurs’ wider direction of travel.

Manager to watch: Arne Slot

We weren’t at all surprised to see Liverpool’s Champions League game against PSV end 4-1 at Anfield. We were all set to dismiss Liverpool winning by such a scoreline as surely irrelevant to their crisis status. As meaningless as the 5-1 win over Eintracht Frankfurt proved to be to the prevailing vibe.

We were less prepared, even with a Liverpool team that had lost eight of its last 11 games, for it to end 4-1 to the visitors.

This is a season unravelling in front of our eyes in much the same way Man City’s did this time last year, and the evidence that Arne Slot doesn’t know what to do or how to do it to change any of it mounts by the game.

There are conflicting reports about his job security or lack thereof, but the fact we’re even talking about the very real possibility of Slot getting canned six months after winning the league is an extraordinary situation.

Liverpool have lost the run of themselves to the extent that almost every match looks like a trap now, but there surely aren’t many trappier ones for Slot to try and remedy things than this weekend’s task of West Ham away.

It’s a perfect combination of an opponent bad enough that only a comfortable win offers any kind of evidence of anything, but an opponent now confident enough to make achieving that fiendishly difficult.

They may still sit outside the relegation zone only on goal difference, but West Ham have found something that works under Nuno Espirito Santo now and have collected seven of their 11 points this season over their last three games. Liverpool, by comparison, have now lost their own last three games 3-0, 3-0 and 4-1.

It just looks a fixture absolutely ripe for even greater deepening of what has become a very deep crisis indeed.

Player to watch: Michael Keane

Everton face Newcastle this weekend knowing victory would take them six points clear of the Magpies.

The Toffees will be going for a third straight Premier League win, but a first straight Premier League win in which they manage not to get a player sent off for fighting a team-mate. We can’t watch Idrissa Gueye now, because his antics got him suspended, so we’ll have to see how Michael Keane handles it all instead.

And we have to acknowledge the incredible foresight shown by the all-knowing foresight of the ever-mischievous fixture computer in it being Newcastle, proud owners of the most infamous on-field intra-club scrap in Barclays history who Everton face straight after their own tangle with infamy.

Football League game to watch: Stoke v Hull

As Frank Lampard’s Coventry City, to give them their full name, disappear over the horizon it’s all on to see who might join FLCC back in the Premier League next season.

After a pair of defeats to FLCC and Leicester, Stoke got their own bid to return to the big time back on track with a 3-0 win over Charlton in the week.

And a Saturday lunchtime kick-off against Hull – who have for now slipped out of the play-off picture on the back of three defeats in their last four – offers the Potters a chance to set down an early marker for the rest of those in pursuit of FLCC.

European game to watch: Roma v Napoli

While we fear for the Premier League title race, we really do, over in Italy they look like they could be set for an absolute all-timer.

While the current gap between first and second in the Premier League sits at six points – and could very conceivably be nine once this weekend is over – with plausible rivals to Arsenal’s dominance falling away with alarming speed, those same six points currently cover the entire top six in Italy.

And look out, because just a point further back come Juventus who can’t yet be completely ruled out of anything.

It all means that right now on any given weekend you’re quite likely to stumble into a crucial top-of-the-table clash just by sheer weight of numbers, and this week gives us a doozy with current leaders Roma hosting third-placed defending champions Napoli, who would leapfrog Gian Piero Gasperini’s side with a win.