Five Reasons to Watch Football This Weekend

Well, who could have seen that coming? Dave Whelan ​outing himself as a racist is probably the least shocking self-bigoting to happen in English football since Jamie Carragher's autobiography came out. Although rather than just make some dodgy remarks about foreigners, Whelan went for full-blown anti-semitism.

The timing of his remarks couldn't be worse, of course. He's just made the controversial move to appoint the confirmed racist, homophobe and sexist Malky Mackay as the club's manager. But hey, the guy deserves a second chance, right? Would we all want our text messages read aloud at an FA hearing? Haven't we all subjected all of our employees to relentless sexual and racial abuse in our time?

Exclusive. Dave Whelan reveals leg break at Wembley. Incredibly brave. — Joe. (@JoeMConnolly)March 9, 2014

I can't help but feel this reflects a sort of inherent powerlessness that football fans have. Sure, there might be sizeable majorities defending people like Mackay, Whelan and even ​Ched Evans but as the FIFA chaos shows, people in charge of football can basically do what they like – to the extent that they're prepared to endure all manner of hassle to acquire the services of bang-average jobbers like Evans and Mackay. Why bother? Is there really nobody else of their calibre out there? You know, who doesn't racially abuse or rape people?

This is going to be a very strange game, beeause one of these sides is in the process of metamorphising into the other. No, it's not Arsenal to United – despite the dick-waving purchases they don't need – but the reverse.

Just look at the evidence. Exciting, attractive football let down by horribly meek displays elsewhere on the pitch? Check. Scared wee boys in an injury-plagued, under-resourced defence? Check. The same problems year after year after central midfield-less year? Check. A number of injuries so ridiculous it can't possibly be a coincidence? Check, check, check.

If your milk goes stale… — Arsenal TV Vines (@ArsenaITV)November 14, 2014

It's spreading, too – even the fans have a touch of the Gooners about them these days, as Louis van Gaal is praised as a resounding success despite dragging his side to a measly league position. It's a bit like the old saying: "no plan survives contact with the enemy", because United and Arsenal's excuses for why they're not remotely threatening a title win would look a hell of a lot better were Chelsea not reminding people what a proper title challenger is supposed to look like.

United fans praising this new direction, be it out of denial or something else, may wish to speak to a Gooner. There are raw vegan restaurants who can offer you an experience more satisfying than a moral victory, and Arsenal fans have been subsisting on a diet of those for too long now. Sure, by the end of the Ferguson era United were a dour, win-at-all-costs monster, but that still brings the tears of your enemies. Playing well is not necessarily the best revenge.

Over to the continent now, where we get a truly weird spectacle in the Milan derby. Both teams have become sadly irrelevant in recent years, toiling under the Juventus jackboot, and with Inter sacking Walter Mazzarri to appoint old boy Roberto Mancini just in time for the game, it reeks of only one thing, the pejorative levelled at every small club: yes, this is their cup final.

More than that, though, there's another reunion on the cards. It's Fernando Torres versus Nemanja Vidic. It's true that all life's glories and tragedies are contained within and maximised by football. You can never go back. Torres and Vidic have both been pretty appalling for their new clubs, and it's sad to see what can happen to such formerly great players. A majestic, technically brilliant complete striker and a hard-as-nails centre-back who was the best pure defender in the world for many years. Now, two wheezing old cloggers plodding towards each other in the hope the other one will go down with a calf injury.

The grim inevitability of Roberto Martinez's slow march to either of two electric chairs – the ones in the Spurs or England dugouts – appears to have taken a setback recently as he's gotten off to a pretty terrible start with Everton this year. Given those two prospects, a stay of execution can perhaps be considered a good thing, but he's running out of time to make it look as though he's keeping the team moving forwards.

Injuries have played a part of course, but don't they always. The obvious criticism with relying on loan players was that a vast amount of money would need to be found to keep the team treading water, but even that has proved difficult, despite the money spent on Romelu Lukaku. Far from the next Didier Drogba, at the moment he's looking like the next Emmanuel Adebayor, experiencing terrible downturns of form that coincide with job security.

Still, there's the chance to bail out some of the water on deck this weekend with a game against another England managerial candidate: Sam Allardyce. Martinez was always a plucky one – it wasn't too long that he was in the Premier League before he had a pop at Alex Ferguson – but that attitude is a dangerous one, and looks even more dangerous now he's in need of a win. Consider this: without a vast improvement, his supposedly meteoric rise will see him finish below Swansea City, a team he felt he'd outgrown back in 2009. And given they may well do so with the fuck-it-nobody-good-is-available approach of appointing their centre-back as boss, it's hard not to wonder if the fetishisation of managers is a little bit overblown.

Now that Celtic seem to have got things in order and we won't have what briefly looked like a seven-horse race in the SPL (although don't joke, that title race still outlasted England and Germany's efforts), it looks like attention has shifted back to the second division, where probably the biggest game this weekend is lurking: Hearts vs. Rangers.

Scottish football exists as a sort of gallery of misery. All but two teams in the country play at a ludicrous disadvantage, and the top two are hamstrung by international and pan-European factors beyond their control. Nobody is a winner. But football is supposed to be like that – it's supposed to reflect life, and for the majority of us, it's just one tragedy after another, briefly interspersed by near-misses at real, genuine glory, before sinking again back into tragedy.
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No club sums that up more than Hearts, but they've built a young, hungry squad that's wiping the floor with the division, and keeping a healthy distance ahead of Rangers. Their history of falling just short of miraculous success may linger, but a victory would put serious daylight between them and their ethnoreligious brethren, and Rangers might have another year in the second tier along with the pleasure of being owned by Mike Ashley.

So, there's a huge amount at stake here. But another reason to watch is Lewis MacLeod, a prime example of modern Scottish masculinity, probably coming to a Premier League team near you soon. If the players that Scotland are producing recently are anything to go by, then we can at least shoot the "a strong league means a strong national team" myth in the head. Compare it to pretty much anything associated with the FA over the past five years and suddenly it doesn't look quite so depressing.​

​@Callum_TH

More Dave Whelan news  – ​Last Night the Internet Bombarded Me with Hate Because My Name Is David Whelan