And to our enormous relief it really is a Big Midweek after the interlull and FA Cup quarter-final weekend.
A warm welcome back to the Premier League. We are very sorry we were so mean about you.
Game to watch: Liverpool v Everton
No pressure, everyone, but we will insist this be every bit as entertainingly unhinged as the Goodison game. In essence, if the week after this match isn’t filled with Reach websites pretending Liverpool might get a points deduction, then we will be extremely disappointed.
For very obvious reasons, Liverpool v Everton is always a game to watch, but there is just a smidge more riding on this than might otherwise have been the case. If Arsenal have beaten Fulham on Tuesday night – not a gimme, but let’s just say the Cottagers didn’t hit the ground running on their return after the international break – then suddenly Liverpool’s unassailable 15-point lead has become a nine-point one without Arne Slot’s side so much as muddying their boots in a Premier League game.
Let us not get too bogged down in the Utter Woke Nonsense that is the fact Liverpool haven’t played a league game since March 8 and instead focus on things just going ever so slightly belly up after an absurdly serene season that must have had Slot wondering what precisely all this Barclays fuss is actually about.
That last league outing was itself unconvincing, Liverpool forced to come from behind at home to beat what may yet prove to be the worst Premier League side of all time, and since that awkward Saturday afternoon absolutely ages ago Liverpool’s only football has been to get knocked out of the Champions League by PSG and then totally fail to turn up against a rampant Newcastle in the Carabao final.
By the time they take to the field for the Merseyside derby they will have had 17 days to stew on that particular failure to launch while also potentially seeing Arsenal eat into that admittedly still imposing lead.
Liverpool will still be absolutely fine. They still only need at most 16 points from their last nine games with home games against West Ham and Tottenham and a trip to Leicester offering some nice easy ones along the way for a team that has still only lost once all season in the league.
But there’s no doubt that for the first time all season there is an air of vulnerability about the best team in the country, who now have a bit of ring-rust to contend with as well because football insists on a fixture list where the gaps between matches must always be either far too small or absurdly large, and that in these circumstances there are easier tasks than having to take on a rejuvenated local rival who haven’t lost a game since mid-January (albeit with an 18-day wait since their own most recent outing) and would like nothing more than to shove another stick in the spokes of their neighbours’ title charge.
Big Final Run-in: Liverpool transfer prep, Arsenal, Nottingham Forest, Maresca, Foden
Team to watch: Chelsea
Still not attracting as much attention as others, but Chelsea are in the midst of another peculiar season and remain a club that appears to have made kooky long contracts its entire personality.
On the pitch it’s a tough season to stand out as a big club engaged in shambling. Chelsea haven’t been as unexpectedly bad as Man City or as hilariously bad as Man United or Spurs. They will, probably, still end up qualifying for the Champions League despite themselves.
But the early-season promise of something approaching a halfway acceptable on-field return for the insane levels of investment have now almost entirely fizzled out. They will probably still win the Europa Conference, but their hearts really don’t look in it.
They have gone out meekly in both domestic cup competitions, revealing some understandable if still unacceptable small-time tendencies from an unarsed Enzo Maresca, who is, we must all take care to remember, still in his first season of top-flight management.
And in the league it’s now just four wins in a 13-game run stretching back to mid-December. And those wins have been against four of the current bottom five.
The good news, though, is that they won’t have to raise their level much – or even at all – upon their return to action because they’re at home to Tottenham and being at home to Tottenham is about as close to a guarantee of a cure for any Chelsea ills as is known to medical science.
Of course, the flipside of that is the unlikely but not impossible scenario in which they don’t in fact win this game, because that really would set alarm bells ringing.
Thomas Tuchel lasted less than a month after failing to beat Tottenham at home back in 2022, and he’d just won the Champions League. Enzo Maresca has not just won the Champions League, and a mistake here in Chelsea’s most bankable home fixture opens the very real possibility that they will once again not be in it next season.
Player to watch: Bukayo Saka
We were already irrationally annoyed about having to wait three more days for a hit of Barclays after the international break and doubly so upon discovering that shunting the whole programme to midweek doesn’t even give us one of the ‘every game live on TV’ treats that we’re all supposed to be grateful for when it should obviously just be the norm.
So there are only actually three games you can watch on TV in the UK, and Arsenal v Fulham isn’t one of them. That means you’ll have to wait for Match of the Day on Wednesday night for a proper chance to watch Bukayo Saka’s long-awaited return from injury there being, ahem, absolutely no, cough, other way around that.
Even in this rather frustrating league season for the Gunners they remain good enough that the loss of their most important player hasn’t derailed them entirely. This is no one-man team and they’ve still lost only one of the 12 Premier League games he’s missed since suffering a hamstring injury at Crystal Palace just before Christmas.
But there’s no doubt that Arsenal have – with one outrageous standout exception – been a slightly duller, less vibrant and less vital team without him. His absence has been keenly felt not just for his own prodigious output but the now clearer than ever way he elevates those around him.
Arsenal thought they missed Martin Odegaard when he was injured earlier in the season. They’ve missed him nearly as much in the last few months and he’s actually been playing. Saka isn’t just a wonderful player, but a wonderful player who makes everyone around him better.
The last few months have shown just why Mikel Arteta has been so reluctant to give Saka any kind of rest, despite the obvious risk that what happened might happened. They just couldn’t afford to be without him.
Arteta says Saka is ‘ready to go’ and we believe it. Quite how far the return of Saka can propel Arsenal over the closing weeks of the season remains to be seen, but the Gunners should at the very least be a more consistently compelling team to watch with their main man back in action.
Manager to watch: Ruben Amorim
The Saka Situation may have made Arteta one of few managers to welcome the extended break between games. Ruben Amorim certainly won’t have welcomed it.
United’s latest corner-turning may have been wildly overstated by a desperate media, but it also isn’t nothing. They have been slightly better than they were, and there are some signs of players at last getting to grips with what really isn’t so outlandish or unusual a set-up that it should have been so very far beyond them for so very long.
The seven-match ‘unbeaten’ run United are on may include an FA Cup penalty shoot-out defeat and only in fact feature wins over Ipswich, Leicester and Real Sociedad but from little acorns and all that.
A trend for United this season has been for them to be just about able to summon up enough to beat the very worst teams in this season’s Premier League – and those teams really are historically bad – while having just enough muscle memory to look vaguely like a Proper Man United Team for games against their old rivals Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and City. They’ve got results against all of them.
But that leaves a whole bunch of clubs in the middle against whom United have generally lost or more recently sometimes drawn. And by definition they now face the very hardest challenge that group of clubs can offer: third-placed Nottingham Forest, away from home.
Get something from this game and maybe Amorim really is on to something at last. Especially with a gimme coming up at the weekend against Man City.
READ: Nottingham Forest vs Man United prediction, expected line-ups, how to watch and stats
Football League game to watch: Doncaster Rovers v Walsall
There’s a full programme of League One and League Two matches to choose from on Tuesday night and, while a second-bottom v second-top Paul Mullin Derby between Cambridge and Wrexham is not without its charms, it’s a clash from the ferociously tight League Two promotion battle that has to get the nod here.
Leaders Walsall have forgotten how to win at an inopportune time. Five draws and a defeat in their last six have left them far less secure than a League Two leader might ordinarily be at this stage of the season with three automatic promotion spots available.
Lose here at fourth-placed Doncaster and they potentially find themselves in the slightly uncomfortable position of having only a two-point cushion over a team with a game in hand.
The good news for both these sides is that as well as fourth v first this midweek round also offers up second-placed Bradford against third-placed Port Vale. Given how tight it all is with just five points separating those four sides – and Wimbledon and Notts County very interested observers a point further back – it’s sure to be a round of games that significantly reshapes the promotion picture one way or another.
European game to watch: Atletico Madrid v Barcelona
Really are spoiled for choice here thanks to some top-tier cup semi-final action. You can even treat yourself to the first half-hour of Milan v Inter in the first leg of their Coppa Italia semi-final first leg before switching over to the second leg of this Copa del Rey semi-final.
We wouldn’t recommend missing the start of this one, though – or indeed any of the rest of it based on a bonkers first leg at the Olympic Stadium that somehow ended all square at 4-4 after Atleti raced out into a 2-0 lead in the first six minutes and then clawed back a 4-2 deficit in the final six.
