Big Weekend: Tottenham v Man City, Liverpool, Tammy Abraham, Michael Carrick, Gary O’Neil | OneFootball

After a tremendously fun Big Midweek of UEFAball it’s back to the bread and butter of the Premier League this weekend.

But don’t worry, it’s still big. Very big. And a lot of that’s down to the fact we’ve got Spurs v Man City to enjoy. There are few more reliable fixtures for some kind of nonsense or other, and Spurs – the 14th best team in England but the fourth best in all of Europe – are currently in the mood for delivering piping hot nonsense at frankly dangerous levels.

Liverpool, too, would quite like to add some of their continental brio to their domestic offerings, while DNA-powered Man United reviver Michael Carrick must now prove he can do it in the non-blockbuster Sunday 2pm slot.

Game to watch: Tottenham v Manchester City

You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? We know it, you know it, Pep Guardiola knows it. Thomas Frank probably doesn’t know it, but he doesn’t know much of anything these days.

But yes, obviously, Spurs are obviously going to win this game. Rarely if ever has the fundamental paradox of Tottenham-City games applied more than it does here, to wit: the less likely a Tottenham win logically appears to be, the more likely it is to happen.

And right now a Tottenham win in any game – obviously this only applies to any game of proper football in a difficult competition, not tish and fipsy like the Champions League – is a highly illogical outcome.

Spurs have just come through the gentlest imaginable run of fixtures, a January of almost cartoonish ease with which to get themselves back into contention for the European spots, and somehow come out the other side of it in the heat of a proper relegation battle having won not a single one of their last five Premier League games. They’ve lost back-to-back against two teams whose winless Premier League runs extended to double figures before their appointment with the good doctor, and coming minutes away from making that three on the bounce at Burnley.

Meanwhile they’ve been casually winning games in Europe like it’s nothing. In the last three months, Spurs have now won twice as many Champions League games (4) as they have Premier League ones (2).

A team that now, as an apparent point of principle, insists upon conceding at least two stupid and easily preventable goals in every single Premier League match they play has kept more clean sheets in the Champions League than anyone else.

This is Spurs heritage. This is what they do. Spursy has never been purely about the spectacular ability for the disastrous and humiliating; it has always required the ability to occasionally and often entirely inexplicably hit absurd heights to make the pratfalls so much bigger and funnier.

And for many years now, Man City have been a key punching bag along the way in the set-up for whatever nonsense Spurs are building up to. While for the last couple of seasons Spurs have perfected this wonderful new bit of being a clinical force in Europe but worse than ever before domestically, they’ve quite rightly never abandoned the ever-bankable ‘improbable victory over Pep Guardiola’s Man City’ bit.

They’ve won their last two trips to the Etihad 4-0 and 2-0, and also knocked City out of the Carabao last season.

This latest instalment is unfortunately at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, where Burnley and Brentford remain the only Premier League teams this season to leave empty-handed, but does come with added banter potential from not just Spurs’ own stupid form but the fact last weekend’s results have got City right back on Arsenal’s coat-tails in the title race.

It’s still a bit early in the season for it to become a true repeat of the great 23/24 final-week showpiece, especially with Spurs so uncomfortably close to the bottom three. But it is nevertheless a game that has either a win-win or lose-lose element to it for Spurs, depending on your outlook.

And it gives us the latest chance to wheel out one of our very favourite stats. Since Wolves returned to the top flight in 2018/19, Spurs have taken 18 points from their 15 Premier League games against them. Over that exact time period, Spurs have 23 points from 15 Premier League games against Man City.

Now we know Wolves were quite good for some of that time, but for a lot of that time City were the most relentless collector of Premier League points Our League has ever known. Yet Spurs hold a 7-6 winning record against them over a time period that includes only the very last not-very-good-actually bits of the Pochettino era and all the awful crud that’s followed. And we’ve not even mentioned the infamous Champions League quarter-final.

We have no idea why it keeps happening as often as it does, but we can only assume it will keep happening for as long as Spurs remain so resolutely, utterly and determinedly Spurs.

Team to watch: Liverpool

Spurs aren’t the only team using the Champions League to mask their domestic failings, with Liverpool managing to even finish above the all-conquering European night Lilywhites after thrashing Qarabag to finish third in the standings and achieve some level of cathartic release after the loss of the most misleading unbeaten run on record with that late defeat at Bournemouth.

And like Spurs, Liverpool now face a tricky game in which to try and port some of that European feel-good vibe to a misfiring Premier League campaign.

They’re not exactly the same, sure. Liverpool are trying to win an undignified scrap for the Champions League placings and Spurs are trying not to get actually relegated, but the point stands.

Newcastle are Saturday night’s opponents for Arne Slot. The lowliest of the English teams in the Champions League having finished all the way down in a perfectly decent 12th, and it’s fair to say that they used up a bit more gas in battling gamely if in the end not that meaningfully to a 1-1 draw against the holders PSG on Wednesday night.

It was a result that left both of them outside the top eight, and burdens Newcastle with another couple of games in a crucial month as they now try to avoid finishing outside the top five in England.

Player to watch: Tammy Abraham

Unai Emery may be rueing his decision to start Ollie Watkins in a broadly meaningless final game of the Europa League league phase after Villa’s star striker limped off in the first half with what looked like a hamstring issue.

But things would be a sight worse if they hadn’t managed to tie up a deal to bring Tammy Abraham back to Villa Park. It’s a rather neat marker of Villa’s rise that Abraham’s season at Villa Park in 2018/19 involved scoring 25 goals to get them out of the Championship, and he will have rather different targets for the remainder of this campaign.

Watkins’ injury makes Abraham potentially an even more important signing even more quickly for a team whose sheer lack of alternatives goes some way to explaining why Watkins was being used in such a low-wattage game in the first place.

Abraham will now, we assume, be thrust straight into the action and charged with the small matter of instantly providing the goals to keep Aston Villa’s title challenge going. Best of luck, Tammy.

Manager to watch: Michael Carrick

The wins over City and Arsenal were extraordinary and thrilling. But the reality is that even at their lowest ebbs United have, under all their various failures of post-Fergie managers, quite often managed to summon up sufficient muscle memory to give the teams that used to be their direct rivals a rare old game.

Even under Amorim they would sometimes take points off your Citys or your Arsenals or the Liverpools of this world.

What United have been less good at, particularly in the Ten Hag and Amorim eras, is reliably sorting out the vast glut of decent mid-table teams that you get in your modern Premier League now.

As such, and as dreary yet contrarian as it feels to say it, what we see from Carrick and his side this weekend against Fulham may well tell us more about his and their long-term prospects than the magnificent and attention-grabbing nonsense we’ve had so far.

Football League game to watch: Sheffield Wednesday v Wrexham

Wrexham’s march through the divisions may not yet be done as they launch an improbable bid for the play-offs in the Championship, the division that was supposed to bring Hollywood FC back to reality.

No escape from reality for Sheffield Wednesday, who remain seven points away even from being able to end the season where everyone else began it.

European game to watch: Strasbourg v PSG

The European champions are still operating some way short of their brilliant continent-conquering best this season. Having been forced by Newcastle into once again taking the scenic route to Champions League glory they must now protect their fragile advantage atop Ligue 1 on a trip to face Gary O’Neil’s Strasbourg.

And they’ve been in the business of slapping sides silly since O’Neil PFMed his way onto the Ligue 1 scene. Not sides as good as PSG, admittedly, but this looks a slippery test indeed for a team that had to expend a lot of energy for not a lot of end result at the Parc des Princes on Wednesday night.

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

Chelsea’s long reign as the dominant force in English women’s football appears to be over. Last week’s defeat to Arsenal has left them nine points off relentless pace being set at the summit by City.

If something utterly remarkable is going to happen for Chelsea on the run-in, then it absolutely has to start with a win here. For City, the chance to definitively shut the door on any possibility of a visit from Chokey McBottlejob.