Arsenal can take another big step on their eerily serene march towards what is apparently an increasingly inevitable and straight-forward Premier League title with current nearest pursuers Chelsea in the Gunners\u2019 sights this weekend.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, serenity \u2013 eerie or otherwise \u2013 is in shorter supply at Tottenham and Liverpool, who could both do with victory over Fulham and West Ham respectively to ease the pressure on managers who are currently becoming beleaguered at an alarming rate.<\/p>\n
And at the Hill Dickinson it\u2019s all eyes on Michael Keane to see if he can avoid getting lamped by a team-mate this weekend.<\/p>\n
That sounds like a Big Weekend to us.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Game to watch: Chelsea v Arsenal<\/p>\n
Depending on how the weekend\u2019s earlier games have panned out, Arsenal\u2019s short trip to Stamford Bridge will give them the chance to open a lead over the rest of at least seven and perhaps as many as nine points<\/a>.<\/p>\n If they can beat a team that is, and we\u2019re not quite sure how this has happened, their nearest current challengers then it really will start to become very hard indeed to see how anyone stops them ending what would be a 22-year wait for a Premier League title in May. It really does already look very much like the only team that can stop Arsenal doing that is Arsenal themselves.<\/p>\n It won\u2019t be Liverpool<\/a>. It almost certainly won\u2019t be Man City. And that takes out the only two teams who\u2019ve won the league since Chelsea themselves back in 2017. And the Premier League feels a very different place now than it did back then.<\/p>\n You\u2019d like to think Chelsea will at least make things harder for Arsenal than Spurs did last weekend<\/a>, but Arsenal\u2019s current imperious form does lead one to suspect another victory for the leaders is on the cards and the four-team Premier League title race we dreamed of \u2013 demanded, even \u2013 really could be down to just one team before the Christmas decorations go up.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Team to watch: Tottenham<\/p>\n Meanwhile, in the other half of North London, something stirs. The capitulation in the North London Derby might \u2013 might \u2013 have finally caused something to click in Thomas Frank\u2019s brain. He might have just realised that losing without even trying do anything but will get him sacked a lot quicker than losing but at least looking like you occupy a universe in which that might not happen.<\/p>\n It is profoundly and almost unimprovably Spurs to be able to say \u2013 and entirely mean it \u2013 that a 5-3 defeat in a game you\u2019ve led twice was genuinely encouraging. But the 5-3 defeat at PSG in a game Spurs led twice really was genuinely encouraging<\/a>.<\/p>\n We\u2019re not quite sure where Frank plucked his wingless wonders midfield diamond formation from, but it worked really rather well for extremely long periods of the game in Paris.<\/p>\n The goals Spurs did concede in that game \u2013 and yes, there were an awful lot of them \u2013 came from individual rather than systemic errors. Spurs had held PSG at arm\u2019s length alarmingly easy until Vitinha slapped home an equaliser off the underside of the bar from long range just before the break.<\/p>\n It all went quite dramatically downhill in the second half, but it never felt like the system was at fault. It, quite simply, never felt like Arsenal felt. Like a game surrendered before a ball had been kicked<\/a>.<\/p>\n On another day with that exact performance, Spurs could easily have left Paris with a point. Three, even. There is no universe or dimension or timeline real or imagined where they leave Arsenal with anything other than a beating.<\/p>\n Arsenal and PSG away in consecutive games was always likely to end badly, but the hope must be that a penny has dropped for Frank after the contrasting reaction to contrasting approaches yielding, on this occasion, identical results.<\/p>\n But what we still don\u2019t know is how Frank will apply what (we hope) he\u2019s learned from those away games to the more prosaic but apparently for Spurs equally difficult task of picking up points from relatively far easier home games.<\/p>\n They are still without a Premier League home win since the opening weekend, their record at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium across more than a year now reaching an absurd three wins in 20 Premier League games.<\/p>\n What happens next against a Fulham team still down in 15th but showing signs of life after two wins in their last three games feels like it\u2019s of enormous importance to Spurs\u2019 wider direction of travel.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Manager to watch: Arne Slot<\/p>\n We weren\u2019t at all surprised to see Liverpool\u2019s Champions League game against PSV end 4-1 at Anfield. We were all set to dismiss Liverpool winning by such a scoreline as surely irrelevant to their crisis status. As meaningless as the 5-1 win over Eintracht Frankfurt proved to be to the prevailing vibe.<\/p>\n We were less prepared, even with a Liverpool team that had lost eight of its last 11 games, for it to end 4-1 to the visitors.<\/p>\n This is a season unravelling in front of our eyes<\/a> in much the same way Man City\u2019s did this time last year, and the evidence that Arne Slot doesn\u2019t know what to do or how to do it to change any of it mounts by the game.<\/p>\n There are conflicting reports about his job security or lack thereof, but the fact we\u2019re even talking about the very real possibility of Slot getting canned six months after winning the league is an extraordinary situation.<\/p>\n Liverpool have lost the run of themselves to the extent that almost every match looks like a trap now, but there surely aren\u2019t many trappier ones for Slot to try and remedy things than this weekend\u2019s task of West Ham away.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a perfect combination of an opponent bad enough that only a comfortable win offers any kind of evidence of anything, but an opponent now confident enough to make achieving that fiendishly difficult.<\/p>\n