Big Weekend: Liverpool v Tottenham, Man United, Pep Guardiola, Kai Havertz | OneFootball

An absolutely bumper weekend of Barclays, this. And the revolution will be televised.

Eight of the ten fixtures are broadcast live across this weekend. While Burnley, Bournemouth, Sunderland and Brighton might ask what they’ve done to offend anybody, the rest of us can sit back and enjoy a pure feast of football.

There are massive six-pointers in the Champions League race. Huge games for the title challengers. Chances for the relegation battlers to nudge ever closer to survival and to top it off an absolute guarantee of nonsense in the headline Super Sunday slot.

Liverpool v Tottenham is about as close as you can get to certain ridiculousness and ritual humiliation in the Premier League, and that held true in times when Spurs have been relatively competent. We genuinely cannot wait to see what they’ve got in store for us at a time when relatively competent feels like an absurd pipe dream.

Game to watch: Liverpool v Tottenham

I fear to watch, yet I cannot turn away. Lord alone knows what happens in here. We’ve given up thinking that Spurs have hit rock bottom because every time we say it they find new, previously undiscovered rockier bottoms.

But if their trip to Anfield contains something worse than having to sub off a distraught keeper after 17 minutes because he’s been directly responsible for two of the three goals already conceded then, well, it’s going to be quite the spectacle.

Thing is, if you were going to pick one ground for Spurs in their current tailspin to somehow conjure up the worst thing yet, Anfield is the one you’d go for.

Spurs’ last four visits here have ended 5-1, 4-0, 4-2 and 4-3. And those atrocious bare numbers tell barely half the story anyway. There’s a very strong argument that the 4-3, nominally the closest and least embarrassing of those defeats, was in fact the worst.

Spurs were three down inside 15 minutes that day – a week after they’d been five down in 21 minutes at Newcastle – but battled back to 3-3 in stoppage time before chaotically handing Liverpool a winner after one of Richarlison’s most cursed celebrations ever.

In the 4-2, Spurs were 4-0 down inside an hour. The 4-0 was in last season’s Carabao after Spurs had taken a 1-0 lead to Anfield on the back of an inspired Antonin Kinsky debut in the first leg. The 5-1 was Liverpool’s title party, in which an early anomalous Spurs lead was swiftly turned into a 3-1 half-time advantage for the hosts.

The point here is that all the hits Spurs have been playing under Igor Tudor’s watchful eye over the last few weeks are precisely the sort of things they’ve been routinely doing at Anfield for years anyway.

The last time Spurs actually won here, their goalscorers were Luka Modric and Rafa van der Vaart.

Which all does kind of explain the otherwise inexplicable decision to keep Tudor on. He is now just a sacrificial lamb, served up on the Anfield altar for ritual humiliation so that at least it isn’t the next new guy facing it.

Spurs are betting everything on the idea it will end up being worth throwing this game away – despite then having only eight games in which to save themselves from themselves – in the hope that allowing the new manager a free swing in a dead rubber against Atletico Madrid and then hoping against hope for a bounce in the gigantic pre-interlull six-pointer against Nottingham Forest is a better Hail Mary than trying anything at all at Anfield, where misery has been all but guaranteed for season after season anyway.

The counterpoint to that, of course, is that this is itself an unusually vulnerable and fragile Liverpool team. Among Spurs’ current direct rivals, Forest have won here while both Leeds and Burnley have left with a point.

When you think about it, the new rock-bottom Spurs might actually manage to find this weekend could be that they accidentally draw this game and the sacrificial manager survives.

Team to watch: Man United

Because they’re quite interesting to watch at the moment anyway, but also because it’s just a very rare opportunity. After Sunday’s Champions League qualification six-pointer against Aston Villa, United play Bournemouth on Friday night and then… nothing until they face Leeds on April 13.

Now there are exaggerating elements at play here. The shuffling of fixtures for TV has served to make the gap as large as it can possibly be, with a Friday night fixture before the international break and a Monday night game when they belatedly make their post-FA Cup quarter-final weekend return after it.

But still. It remains an extraordinary thing, especially when this is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About, to be looking at a 24-day chasm between fixtures in what is traditionally considered the busiest part of the season.

It really has been a mad campaign of Big Sixery. You’ve got two clubs still, in theory, chasing the quadruple. One apparently barely even trying to fight what is now, dizzyingly, the likelihood of relegation, and another casually sauntering through the shortest possible season any top-flight team can have and with what now appears to be a laser focus on winning as many games as possible but never enough of them in a row to knock that haircut grifter off his f*ckin’ perch.

Not like Chelsea and Liverpool have been going around having entirely normal seasons either, is it?

Anyway, Man United. Big game this one for both teams, obviously. Villa at least will come into it with the confidence of being England’s only winners in the first leg of the various European last-16 games this week, but that in itself only highlights the curious unintended and unwanted advantage this lightly-raced United side have fashioned for themselves in this season’s four-into-three battle for Champions League places.

They may have only two matches to play in the next entire month, but they’re also coming into this one on the back of a 10-day rest since Newcastle and Carrick’s first defeat.

Manager to watch: Pep Guardiola

He’s done it again, hasn’t he? He’s gone into a massive Champions League match and instead of just backing his normal team to be normally good enough in a normal way playing normally against an elite but wounded opponent, he has overthought it and paid the price.

Three wingers this time. Three wingers in the Bernabeu, leaving a threadbare midfield that was all too easily played through and over by Real Madrid. We’re not even sure peak Rodri would have been able to do what Guardiola demanded of him in what did look at times more like a 4-1-1-4 than anything else in that costly first half.

Fair to say those quadruple hopes now look quite unlikely, but the Premier League title hopes are not yet forlorn.

They do have almost no margin for error, though. City are likely to find themselves 10 points adrift of Arsenal by the time they take to the field against West Ham on Saturday night. Even with games in hand, that is not a gap that can be allowed to remain at this stage.

They must win against a West Ham team who are in decent nick and will quite rightly view this game as something of a free hit in a relegation battle they do currently appear to be winning.

It feels like a dangerous moment for Guardiola and his team, a trappy fixture they ought to win but against a dangerous, confident opponent and sandwiched between two Champions League games against Real Madrid that have already sent Pep’s galaxy brain to Mars.

Player to watch: Kai Havertz

It is inevitably and understandably tough to predict quite how Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta is going to set about keeping all his plates spinning from one match to the next at the moment, with the Gunners shuffling their depleted pack to keep all four trophies in sight and cause all manner of metaphors to be excruciatingly mixed.

But one side-effect of injury problems and competing on multiple fronts can be that the return of a long-term injured player provides a welcome freshness. Kai Havertz feels like that man for Arsenal right now.

He stepped off the bench to get them back on level terms at Leverkusen this week and you wonder if now’s the time for him to get just a third Premier League start of the season. With Martin Odegaard still absent and Eberechi Eze still unpredictable against anyone other than Spurs, Havertz might just be the man to help Arsenal recover their open-play mojo and unlock what is sure to be stubborn opposition in Everton.

David Moyes’ side are unbeaten in six away from home and will not make life easy for whoever gets the nod from Arteta on Saturday evening.

Football League game to watch: Coventry v Southampton

It’s turning into a victory lap for Coventry, whose lead at the top of the Championship is already eight points and could stretch out to 11 before the 3pm games even begin this weekend.

Second-placed Middlesbrough are also in Saturday lunchtime televised action against Bristol City, who have once again secured mid-table anonymity and no more than that.

Southampton, for their part, still have play-off aspirations. They sit three points outside the top six and can’t really afford to see that gap stretch out at this stage.

European game to watch: Atletico Madrid v Getafe

If only to see whether Getafe have brought the right boots with them, and how long their keeper lasts if not.

Women’s Super League game to watch: Aston Villa v Man City

It’s been a month since the last WSL action, which might be just as well for Aston Villa given how each of these teams got on in their last game all the way back in the mists of time. Well, mid-February anyway.

Champions-elect City sauntered to a 6-0 win over Leicester on that occasion. For Villa, it was a wild 7-3 defeat to Spurs.

Now Spurs have been impressive in this season’s WSL and look set for a top-five finish, but before the trip to Villa had scored 19 goals in 15 games. City have scored 47. Six of those came in the reverse fixture against Villa, who a week before the Spurs embarrassment had lost 4-1 to a Liverpool side who’d only picked up one win all season until then.

However big the gap between games, we’re really not sure you want to come up against this Man City side on the back of conceding 11 goals in your last two games against significantly weaker ones.