Big Weekend: Chelsea v Leeds, Pep Guardiola, Arsenal, Ollie Watkins, Ipswich

It’s FA Cup semi-final weekend and the biggest of Calum McFarlane’s career as he finds himself cast in the Ryan Mason role, while Manchester City will surely take their next step towards a possible treble in the other semi.

Back in the league, Arsenal have the chance to reclaim the spot they’ve occupied for 200 days of the season so far and, with what’s left of the relegation fight left slumming it in the Saturday 3pm slot, it’s all eyes on a World Cup contender in the weekend’s other live Premier League game.

That’s not all, though, with the mad scramble for automatic promotion from the Championship also coming to a head. It is – you guessed it – yet another Big Weekend.

You probably have to go back to Ryan Mason taking charge of Spurs in the 2021 Carabao final to find a more extreme example of a club blowing themselves up just before a major domestic game at Wembley.

A hill upon which we will die is that Spurs’ decision, while dramatic and quite desperate, was also fair enough. ‘Serial winner’ he may be, but Jose Mourinho had been actively goading them into sacking him for some time by that point.

He had been knocked out of the Europa League despite a 2-0 first-leg lead and opposition whose manager was in prison, had lost chaotically at Everton in the FA Cup and was on a run of one win in six games. He was not being very serial winnery.

Hard to believe now, but that actually constituted a terrible run for Spurs at the time. That’s what used to pass for Spursy before they found whole new levels of despair.

Calum McFarlane is the Ryan Mason in this scenario, but the simple facts are that no matter how justified if banter-inducing Spurs’ call may have been, Chelsea’s decision to part with their manager and place a novice interim in charge of a trip to Wembley can attract no criticism whatsoever.

All the decisions that led them to having to part with a manager just before an FA Cup semi-final? Sure, those are ripe for criticism. But ripping up Liam Rosenior’s six-year contract after 106 days was a necessary act somewhere close to one of mercy.

Chelsea have found themselves in the semi-finals almost by accident. They have yet to face top-flight opposition to get this far, with their wins over Wrexham (by the skin of their extra-time teeth) and Port Vale (admittedly comfier) their only successes alongside seven defeats in their last nine all-competition games.

And even that tells only a fraction of the story; an absurd five of those defeats have been by a three-goal margin. By the time they have their next chance, Chelsea will have gone two full months without so much as a Premier League goal, never mind a point.

Rosenior bears no comparison to even banter-era caricature Mourinho. And, with all due respect to their sterling recent efforts in securing Premier League safety, Daniel Farke is no Pep Guardiola and Leeds no peak Man City.

Chelsea have a chance now where none really seemed to exist before with LinkedIn Liam toiling in the face of open revolt and – somehow worse – open ridicule from his players . But it still feels like Leeds are clear favourites to win this game, which would have seemed an absurd position really not that long ago.

It says something about the nature of this season’s Premier League but also about these two teams and their current trajectories specifically that here we have an FA Cup semi-final between one team that flirted with the title race before settling into a scrap for Champions League qualification and another who have spent the whole season until the last fortnight firmly embroiled in the relegation race.

Yet now just eight points separate them in the table , and it’s the erstwhile relegation battlers who look by far the better placed to reach the final.

Is he really going to deliver another domestic treble in the most unlikely of seasons? It all seems tremendously possible, yet the fraught and narrow nature of the victory over Burnley in midweek serves as a reminder that it’s not going to be straightforward.

It was supposed to be the game where City took decisive control, going top of the table for the first time since the opening day and after 200 days of Arsenal pre-eminence. They did so, just about, but without the significant goal-difference boost everyone expected after Erling Haaland’s goal inside five minutes.

It was a reminder of where City are and where this season’s Premier League is. These are no longer the days of City winning titles by simply winning their last 15 games of the season without much fuss or alarm. The highest total either City or Arsenal can now reach this season is 85 points, a total that would have placed you a distant, irrelevant third at the peak of the Guardiola-Klopp conflict.

The Premier League is deeper now. There actually are no easy games. This season has been marked by a conspicuous lack of absolute thrashings. It seems unlikely that either team simply wins their way to the title from here.

But City surely won’t go full Arsenal and come a cropper in the FA Cup against Southampton . Will they?

A delicious little fixture-list quirk is that Man City will play an FA Cup semi-final while insisting unconvincingly to have paid no attention at all to what’s happening at the same time nine miles across north London at the Emirates.

Arsenal host a struggling, unconvincing Newcastle side whose travails might well, in a more normal season, have been its biggest talking point. They have a chance to reassert themselves having so shrewdly taken the FA Cup off their own agenda at Southampton. This is the first of two league games they play before City next kick a Premier League ball.

Win those and, given what we’ve said above, the pressure piles back on to Guardiola’s side. The points on the board will feel far more potent than the games in hand.

The obvious point to make is that if Arsenal play anything like as well as they did at City last week , they should win with ease against a Newcastle side limping to the end of the season as a lower mid-table irrelevance.

They’ve lost eight of their last 11 games, their only wins in that time merely highlighting the demise of the old Big Six Newcastle once wished to join, with wins over Spurs, Man United and Chelsea.

The equally obvious point to make about Arsenal is that this will be a far more revealing fixture than City was. It was almost easy for them to play well there. It was almost a free hit. For once, the pressure was off. Almost everyone expected them to lose.

Arsenal’s problem in title run-ins more generally comes in games everyone expects them to win against bruised but still undeniably dangerous opposition.

No shade intended here but we suspect, if they could have their time again, TNT might not have selected Fulham v Aston Villa as their Premier League choice this weekend.

With two games that could either settle once and for all or completely reshape the relegation fight – West Ham v Everton and Wolves v Spurs – both remaining Saturday 3pm affairs, we instead get mid-table Fulham taking on an Aston Villa side now thoroughly safe and secure inside the top five and likely to have at least one eye on the upcoming Europa League semi-final against Nottingham Forest.

The only teams outside the top five within even eight points of Villa’s 58 both have only four games left. It’s entirely possible Villa could lose every one of their remaining games and still be fine. They also probably won’t do that anyway.

So yes, it’s a low-key Saturday lunchtime affair by Premier League run-in standards but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing at stake at all.

There remains an England World Cup squad place ready and waiting for any striker to decisively claim it , for one thing, and with three goals in his last three games Ollie Watkins is making a late grab after a mixed season.

The race to join Coventry in securing automatic promotion is coming to a head with just three points separating Ipswich in second from Middlesbrough in fifth heading into the penultimate full round of games.

Millwall, currently third, are pretty likely to have knocked Ipswich out of second place by beating relegated Leicester before Ipswich travel to a West Brom ending a troubled season with something of a flourish.

The Tractor Boys have an extra safety net in the shape of a game in hand against Southampton, a match pushed into the final midweek of the regular Championship season by the Saints’ FA Cup exploits. But that trip south comes with no guarantees, of course, with Southampton firmly in the promotion picture themselves as well as the semi-finals of the cup.

A win here ensures Ipswich remain in the driving place for second and turns that trip to Southampton into something close to a free hit. An astonishing luxury at this stage of proceedings in a race that’s been so tight.

The Premier League is now just about the only remaining major European league with an actual title race.

Inter have pulled clear in what had for so long looked like being a multi-club scrap for the ages in Serie A. Barcelona have all but wrapped up La Liga. Bayern have actually wrapped up the Bundesliga. PSG will win Ligue 1. Even the Eredivisie has nothing for us, PSV sauntering to a third straight title with astonishing ease.

So after spending a no doubt entertaining couple of hours flicking between Man City in the FA Cup and Arsenal’s attempt to reassert themselves in the Premier League at Saturday evening, we might as well head straight over to Disney+ and have a little look at how the Gunners’ Champions League semi-final opponents are getting on.