Big Weekend: Chelsea v Man City, West Ham, Igor Thiago, Michael Carrick, Celtic v Hearts | OneFootball

The penultimate weekend of the season sees the title race briefly take a backseat as the ever-more-reduced FA Cup final apologises and shuffles into the spotlight before once again reiterating how sorry it is for the inconvenience.

But only for one day will the Barclays allow the old guy to have its moment before it comes roaring back with, okay, no title race action but a Sunday that features yet more vital action in the still very much alive races to reach Europe or avoid the Championship.

And let’s not forget the title decider up in Scotland, where we’re guaranteed either history or a sh*tstorm and with any luck both.

Game to watch: Chelsea v Manchester City

What a curious spectacle the FA Cup final has become and what a source of national shame that should be.

No longer the grand finale of the English season, now an inconvenience. Shoehorned into the penultimate weekend of the season, irritatingly shuttling the much more important Premier League games to the Sunday, and the two featuring the finalists into the final midweek of the season.

It shouldn’t have to be this way. But it is. And it doesn’t help when you’ve got two such distracted finalists. Man City by a still live if surely futile attempt to reel in Arsenal at the top of the table; Chelsea by their own confused despair and existential identity crisis.

The FA Cup has at least been a source of some relief for the Blues during a truly miserable spell in which binning off LinkedIn Liam for Interim Calum hasn’t magically changed anything except for the levels of post-match nonsense-spouting.

It is, entirely ludicrously, now well over two months since Chelsea won a game in any competition other than this one. More ludicrous still that the last non-FA Cup win they did manage was a 4-1 thumping of Aston Villa that put them firmly in pole position to secure Champions League football.

Since then they’ve beaten Wrexham (just), Port Vale (bullyingly) and Leeds (just) in this competition but have been an utter shambles everywhere else, splattered in the Champions League home and away by PSG and slapped silly by almost everyone in the Premier League until earning a point against Liverpool at the weekend. They may very well now need to win here just to get any European football at all next season.

City’s form is, on paper, vastly superior. They’ve won eight of the last nine games since going out of the Champions League, but results have often exceeded performances. Most notably since the 2-1 win over Arsenal that threatened to be so seismic. That was followed by a nervy 1-0 win over Burnley, a deeply unconvincing win over Southampton in the semi-final of this competition – maybe should have sent the work-experience kid to film them training or something – and then that shambolic and damaging 3-3 draw at Everton that has handed control of the title race back to Arsenal. And this time surely decisively.

That has at least seemed to act almost as a release for City, who have swept Brentford and Palace aside since then and will likely do the same here to secure a domestic cup double that will nevertheless feel like a failure of a season if Arsenal don’t somehow go full Arsenal over the week that follows.

Team to watch: West Ham

A chance. They’ve got a chance. After last week’s hugely controversial and infuriating but – and this has occasionally been lost in the noise – inconveniently correct decision to not allow two West Ham players to just foul David Raya at an injury-time corner, a chance was all West Ham could hope for.

Had Spurs beaten Leeds the following night, the Hammers would be all but doomed. But while West Ham are very much still West Ham, Monday night was a vital and timely reminder that even Roberto De Zerbi’s slightly less overtly offensively terrible version of Spurs are very, very much still Spurs, capable of walking into the door frame and knocking themselves out against even the most half-arsed of opposition.

Newcastle will perhaps be using slightly more of their arse than a carefree and newly-safe Leeds did at Spurs – or crucially will on the final day at West Ham should it all still be live by then – because European qualification just about remains a possible unexpected and largely undeserved reward at the end of a deeply disappointing season.

But the key here is the ‘deeply disappointing’. Newcastle are not very good, and there really is no reason West Ham cannot go there and get something. Even a point changes the landscape; assuming it’s followed by a win over Leeds it would require Spurs to win one of their own final two games which it just so happens are being played at the two stadiums in the country where Spurs never, ever win.

A West Ham win would reshape the whole race entirely, suddenly making the Hammers favourites again to survive, pushing Spurs back into the dropzone ahead of a trip to Chelsea.

But defeat at Newcastle and the Hammers are firmly back in despairtown. The goal-difference hole they’re in means any defeat would leave Spurs effectively needing just a single point from their two remaining games, which are – all stadium-related banter aside – against a pair of teams who haven’t won a Premier League game between them since March.

Manager to watch: Michael Carrick

His permanent appointment now appears a formality. Should he and United avoid defeat against a Nottingham Forest team that find themselves suddenly with nothing to play for – news that has positive and negative sides – it will confirm them in third if a stalemate in Friday night’s clash between Aston Villa and Liverpool hasn’t already done so.

It’s undeniably true that the struggles to a greater or lesser extent of Liverpool, Chelsea and Aston Villa over the closing months of the season have given United a powerful assist.

As far as any post-Fergie United manager can operate on easy mode in the country’s most difficult job, Carrick has done so. He has had nothing other than Premier League games to worry himself with. A bittersweet luxury, but one none of his rivals have enjoyed.

The chance to have a free swing at half a season of just Premier League games while carrying none of the blame for why that’s the case is not something many Big Six managers ever get to sample.

But Carrick has also dramatically made the absolute most of his advantages. So quickly and apparently effortlessly did Carrick come in and sweep United up into the Champions League places that it has very quickly just felt normal again.

Really is important to remember that it is very much not that. This is a team that finished 15th last season and, when Carrick took over in January, had won just three of their previous 13 matches in all competitions. Which by that time was already ‘both competitions’ and meant losing for the second time this season at the first hurdle of a domestic cup.

The transformation has been extraordinary and that now effectively secured third place the very outside of any stretch target Carrick could possibly have been set when he took over a United side down in seventh and 11 points adrift of Villa in third.

Player to watch: Igor Thiago

Look, we’re not saying he’s going to definitely do it. But what we are saying is that if you did want to launch an unlikely bid for the Golden Boot from four goals behind one of the deadliest strikers of the age with two games to go, then you would definitely right now want the first of those games to be against a Crystal Palace side who have entirely and correctly checked out of their Premier League campaign to focus on the upcoming Conference League final.

Palace’s last three away games have all ended in defeat and seen them concede three goals apiece to Liverpool, Bournemouth and Man City.

Europe-chasing Brentford can absolutely consider themselves a team in that bracket now, with both Liverpool and Bournemouth very much among the 18 Premier League clubs who would currently be absolutely delighted to have a 22-goal striker to call upon.

European game to watch: Celtic v Hearts

There’s sometimes mischief at play when we toddle off to Scotland for the European game, but there is no chicanery here. It is on its own merits the biggest league game in Europe this weekend.

A title decider, but so, so much more than that. Hearts, who have been the best team in Scotland pretty much all season, have the chance to do what nobody has done for 41 years and break the Old Firm stranglehold on the Scottish title. The oft-stated and valid point about just how difficult a challenge that is, is that the last team to do it wasn’t just over four decades ago but also needed the greatest manager of all time at the helm to pull it off.

But there’s more now, of course. Hearts’ pursuit of immortality is now fuelled not just by their own ambition but a seething, bubbling sense of injustice after a series of decisions that have gone Celtic’s way in recent weeks, reaching a head with the genuinely absurd spectacle of a referee going to a VAR monitor, watching a ball travel a full 20 yards in exactly the way it does when someone heads it, and concluding it must therefore have come off their hand instead.

That late penalty drama secured Celtic a win at Motherwell that totally changes the equation. Celtic now just need to win on the final day and the title will once again be theirs. Nobody, it is fair to say, will be much impressed if that’s the outcome.

Hearts can take, well, heart from their record against Celtic this season with two wins (one at Celtic) and a draw from their three previous meetings. Derek McInnes have lost just one of their last 10 games against all-comers; if they can make that one in 11, history is theirs.