Arsenal v Man City after Ollie Watkins and Ange take centre-stage

A meaty Super Sunday clash takes centre-stage this weekend, while Arsenal’s tentacles also reach out into another big game at Wolves and Ange Postecoglou prepares for his latest last chance at Spurs.

Game to watch: Arsenal v Man City

We’re greedy sorts here and, if we’re being brutally honest, the last couple of Super Sundays haven’t really been up to snuff. We’ve been crying out for a proper big game between proper big beasts pretty much since the FA Cup weekend, but there can be no further complaints now. This is a doozy.

City’s form has significantly improved from its late 2024 nadir, but they remain at times wildly unconvincing and still prone to nonsense that really ought to be beneath them. Even having emerged from the deepest depths of their despair, they’ve still managed to spaff a 2-0 lead at Brentford and then another even more spectacularly at PSG.

And they had to come from a goal down to beat Club Brugge and book a Champions League play-off spot. They are not winning it this year; Clive has spoken.

No such worries for Arsenal, the Gunners having sauntered really quite serenely into the last 16.

That European serenity has been in contrast to a league season that from the outside looking in just seems utterly exhausting for everyone involved. It’s not that it’s going badly – far from it – just that it isn’t going quite as it was supposed to.

Here’s a philosophical conundrum: would Arsenal be quite so hot under the collar and tense if it were once again Man City’s coat-tails on which they sought to cling, rather than Liverpool’s? We do wonder if that’s part of the reason why they’ve gone a bit peculiar. There’s a frustration there, a sense of an opportunity being missed to capitalise on City stumbling out of the title race altogether.

Arsenal’s league season is one that seems to constantly exist on a precipice. They always feel like they are a single game from crisis, from slipping away from a title race they feel in their bones should have been theirs to control, not Liverpool’s.

Still, if there’s one thing to settle Arsenal down in that kind of fevered, febrile state, it’s a game against an undeniably resurgent but still quite strikingly daft Man City.

Player to watch: Ollie Watkins

Weird few days for Ollie Watkins. Played a key role in propelling Aston Villa to a Champions League last-16 spot JUST HOURS after Arsenal made that chunky bid for him, yet he played that key role in a way that kind of showed why maybe this isn’t such a good idea for Arsenal, really.

Watkins for £60m feels like precisely the deal Arsenal should have done last January, not this one. Especially as he now actually is 29. At least if they’d signed him this time last year he would have been 28 until he was 29.

It does seem incredibly churlish when we, like everyone, have been urging Arsenal to sign a striker in January since long before January even began to now turn around and go NO, NOT LIKE THAT. But it does seem an oddly desperate move from Arsenal, who must surely have known it was unlikely to work anyway.

Villa are having absolutely none of it, and were understandably a bit narky about the timing of Arsenal’s bid on the day of such a huge game for Villa. Jhon Duran’s move to Saudi for daft money pretty much confirms what we already suspected: Watkins won’t be going anywhere.

But what we do now have to see is where exactly his head’s at. It all happened so fast on Wednesday that it was probably a blur. Even trying to draw a link between all the speculation and that very funny penalty miss feels a bit crowbarred.

He’s had a couple of days to think on it now, though. Villa very understandably will not be selling their star striker just before the transfer window shuts, but that doesn’t mean the head of a boyhood Arsenal fan won’t have been turned.

Villa could do without all the noise, frankly. A midlands derby at a Wolves side that has gone right off the boil again provides the opportunity for Watkins to show what he’s about.

Team to watch: Nottingham Forest

This Nottingham Forest season has featured a great many things. Bouncing back from massive defeats has not yet really been one of them. Yet that is what they must now do after last weekend’s alarming 5-0 humping at Bournemouth.

Now Bournemouth are very much in what modern football parlance demands be described as ‘a good moment’ but you still shouldn’t really be losing 5-0 there.

Forest now have City and Newcastle right on their tail and any hint of that stumble even threatening to turn into collapse will be pounced upon.

‘If they’re not careful they might only be fifth after this weekend’ is still an inherently ridiculous sort of line to find oneself using about Forest, but they really have created a wonderful opportunity for themselves this season. Shame to let it go now.

A trip to Brighton isn’t necessarily what you’d pick to get back on track either, given how wildly unpredictable those wacky Seagulls can be. But Forest do at least have first-mover’s advantage this weekend, with a Saturday lunchtime slot giving them the chance to ease that gap over their Champions League rivals back out to six points, for a while at least.

Manager to watch: Ange Postecoglou

Still there, isn’t he? Still clinging on, and it’s now clear that – rightly or wrongly – Spurs are going to stick by him until either all trophy routes have been exhausted or they realise they actually are going to get relegated if they don’t panic and get Sean Dyche in on an eight-game contract.

Postecoglou is lucky to still have a job, there’s no question about that. He’s lucky too that an injury crisis at least in part of his own making – it is a statistically unlikely number of twanged hamstrings, isn’t it? – is still being used as mitigation rather than further evidence against him.

But while it’s clear there is no real appetite within the corridors of power at Spurs for change, things are getting dangerously close to untenable. Postecoglou really does need some 2025 Premier League points quite soon.

Spurs did at least have a night to lift the mood in the Europa League on Thursday. Three academy graduates aged 20 or younger all scoring their first Tottenham goals on a night that ended with Dane Scarlett as only the fifth youngest player on the pitch for Spurs was a reminder that there really could be a bright Lilywhite future ahead.

For the more immediate future, Micky van de Ven returning for 45 minutes is an enormous boost; sure the opposition was limited, but it was immediately clear how much difference he makes to Spurs’ general tempo. He and the still-absent Cristian Romero are both front-foot defenders, and that suits the way Postecoglou wants his team to play far more than any of the make-do alternatives Spurs have deployed in the pair’s absence.

Care does need to be taken about overegging this pudding, because Spurs were still quite often quite crap even with their first-choice defensive set-up – the last game Romero, Van de Ven and Guglielmo Vicario all played together was the 1-0 defeat at previously winless Palace, for instance – but their game is more vivid and assertive when Van de Ven is around.

The other reason for caution here is that Postecoglou still talks about Spurs’ injury crisis as if it definitely has an end. On Thursday night, Postecoglou was again talking about how he’ll have his squad back by the time the Europa League knockouts come around.

It feels like dangerous talk. Even here, the return of Van de Ven was cancelled out – in basic numbers if not ability – by an injury to Radu Dragusin.

Postecoglou can’t really afford to wish away the time until his players are all available even if that were a likely end point to this current rolling crisis.

Football League game to watch: Gillingham v Notts County

We’re heading all the way down to League Two here, with the Saturday lunchtime offerings from the Championship a drearily mid-table batch.

For Notts County an early Saturday kick-off against a Gillingham team without a win in their last seven provides a fine opportunity to strengthen their grip on one of the automatic promotion spots available below runaway leaders Walsall

European game to watch: Milan v Inter

A Derby della Madonnina in which Kyle Walker is set to make his Milan debut in place of the injured Emerson Royal? That is a collection of words that has our attention.

Inter should logically be favourites for this one, having lost only three of 32 games across assorted competitions this season. But two of those defeats came against Milan; one in the league and another earlier this month in the Italian Super Cup.

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