Five Reasons to Watch Football This Weekend

(Illustration by Sam Taylor)

At last. The date all football fans around the country will have marked on their calendars since we took our first babysteps into the season in September: it's League Cup weekend, ladies and gentlemen, and this time everybody's so excited they can't remember who the sponsor is.

As it stands, Chelsea are struggling to navigate a rough patch of form, with José Mourinho effectively confirming the long-held theories that he'd actually prefer to scab a 2-1 victory over a relegation candidate with a dodgy penalty than play something resembling football. On the other side are Spurs, whose predictability has led them to fail to win the four games after they defeated Arsenal. The real question here is whether they've exhausted their 'classic Spurs' reserves in those four miserable performances and therefore have a chance, or whether they've still got one more mind-bending fuck-up to come.

Even then, it's the League Cup. It's something you clutch as a consolation prize, as Spurs no doubt will after missing out on the top four again, or Chelsea will after pissing away a lead to Man City. But that's what makes it so great – it's a meaningless game, the happy-go-lucky buccaneering of a friendly married to the posterity of a Cup Final. It is football in its purest form.

Arsenal's pitiful surrender against Monaco may have been a hackneyed image, to the extent that it was hard to imagine them doing anything different were it Real Madrid or Otelul Galati they were playing, but one thing just doesn't make any sense. When Arsenal fall behind in a big game, their standard Modus Operandi is to go to pieces and charge forward any old how without plan or direction, losing the plot and the game. Or at least it has been since the days of Henry and Vieira, and the time since then is what we talk about when we talk about 'Arsenal'. Equating this shower to that team feels like meeting a mild-mannered Swedish Erasmus student descended from Ragnar Lodbrok.

Despite that lily-liveredness, it's weirdly the case that whenever Arsenal are humiliated on a grand scale, it usually inspires them to a decent run of form immediately afterwards, ultimately proving the tacticians and statisticians wrong, and your dad right: they really do just need a kick up the arse. Expect a win against Everton to turn yet another corner in the gigantic Escher's maze of 4th-place finishes that is Arsene's Arsenal, to precede the eventual oh-so-close 2-0 in Monaco.

While we cheered Tim Sherwood's appointment, it's perhaps worth wondering whether his glorious reign at Spurs was his doing or more a product of his environment. We all know that, like England, Spurs fans consist of two camps and managerial appointments pander alternately to one or the other.

On one side, you have the everything-foreign-is-better continentals who know what a 'raumdeuter' is and tweet things like "the best league in the world" every time an English side concedes a goal in Europe. On the other, it's the TalkSPORT veterans, putting everything down to passion, determination, leadership, desire, pride, witchcraft and astrology. These are the yin and yang of the Spurs, and perhaps English religion. The two are in constant opposition, but one can never conquer the other. And life moves in cycles, from Harry Redknapp to André Villas-Boas, to Tim Sherwood, to Mauricio Pochettino.

The point of this is: don't get your hopes up for Sherwood at Villa. He may well turn out to be a banter vacuum now, someone who just bought into the ideals of the club he was at a little bit too much and got carried away, like Terry Butcher throwing out all his "rebel music" U2 records when he joined Rangers. Against Newcastle, it's pretty much do or die, and it might be a long sad demise if they fail, rather than the tears, meltdowns and on-pitch team-talks that we hoped for.

As per last week's column, it looked like Brendan Rodgers was getting his shit together again and finding out how his side operated, but then came Thursday. It's hardly one of Liverpool's worst ever results, but it's hard to imagine a man reading the situation around this Liverpool team more than one who decides to pick Dejan Lovren as 5th-choice penalty-taker without the total, unabashed certainty that he'll sky it to lose the game.

That takes him to this weekend, at home against Man City, and the race for the top four, where his opponents are: a club who got promoted a couple of years ago whose best players he bought in summer, Louis Van Gaal's FIFA 2011 World XI, an Arsenal side undergoing their annual humiliation, and Spurs (no elaboration necessary.) The opportunity is ripe to steal what looked an impossibility after such an awful start.

It's likely, then, that they'll get something from a deeply inconsistent City side and boost their chances of going out in the Round of 16 against Real Madrid next year. Fourth would be a pretty good achievement given where they were at Christmas, but the alarming about-turn from "Balotelli can lead Liverpool to the title" to "Well of course they were never going to actually win it" makes one wonder whether the whole package is there. Undoubtedly, he's talented, but there's a legion of failures and jobbers come in through the door in the past three years who could've been… well, the guys Southampton signed.

The first of March, and we're going to see a game between Celtic and a side that isn't Rangers that could feasibly be termed a 'title decider.' What privileged times in which we live.

Aberdeen have fallen away slightly, but they're still capable of doing it, particularly with Celtic running themselves into the ground in Milan on Thursday. In raw financial power, it'd be an achievement which dwarfs Atletico's title win last season, and it won't even be marred by singing songs about genocide.

Of all the games to watch this weekend, this is the one. Yeah, it'll probably be a 3-0 win for Celtic, but it might not, and if it isn't, it'll be the only place something truly remarkable will happen. Manchester City or Chelsea winning the league? Spurs or Chelsea winning the League Cup? What's the difference? Watch Aberdeen. Watch a load of players you've never heard of maybe get a shot at the ultimate glory, and then get sold on to have disappointing spells at Sheffield Wednesday regardless of whether they succeed or fail.

@Callum_TH