⛅ Friday Forecast: The Mo Salah derby and Burnley to beat Arsenal? | OneFootball

We’ve had so many international breaks this season that two consecutive weekends of Premier League football feels a bit strange.

There’s another full programme of fixtures to come in mid-week too but for now, we’re just taking each game as it comes and this weekend promises to be a good one.

Here’s how we see it all going down…

? Game of the weekend: Liverpool v Chelsea

The biggest match of this round of fixtures will undoubtedly be taking place at Anfield on Saturday evening.

These two clubs’ records against the other big six sides have been a bit of a mixed bag this season. Liverpool hammered Arsenal and drew with Manchester United but were battered by Manchester City and Tottenham, whereas Chelsea beat Spurs and United but were held to a draw by Arsenal and beaten at home by City.

This one is therefore a pretty tough one to call. Antonio Conte has expressed some very legitimate concerns about his side taking a hangover from their mid-week exertions in Azerbaijan into the weekend and it will be interesting to see whether that does prove advantageous to Liverpool or not.

The biggest narrative surrounding this game arguably concerns Mohamed Salah coming up against his old club. The Egyptian made just 19 appearances for the Blues before he was cruelly cast aside by José Mourinho yet he’s proving to be a sensational signing for Liverpool this season and goes into Saturday’s clash as the league’s top scorer.

What odds on him doing what Kevin De Bruyne did back in September and rubbing his former employers’ noses in it? It seems almost inevitable.

But at the other end, if Liverpool defend like they did in Tuesday’s ridiculous 3-3 draw with Sevilla, the likes of Eden Hazard and Álvaro Morata will be sure to make them pay.

We have no idea how this game will pan out, to be honest, so let’s just hope football is the true winner.

Easiest 3️⃣ points: Manchester United v Brighton

We backed United to come up trumps against Newcastle last weekend and despite an iffy opening half an hour, Mourinho’s men eventually proved us right with an impressively professional second half performance.

The Red Devils are at home to another newly promoted side this weekend and though Brighton are more than holding their own in the top flight this season, we’ll be astonished if they come away from Old Trafford with anything but a football lesson learned.

The triumphant returns of Paul Pogba and Zlatan Ibrahimović could hardly have come at a better time for United and the former, in particular, showed just how important he is to his team with a superb performance last weekend.

That said, while the mid-week defeat away at Basel may not have been catastrophic in terms of United’s European adventure, it did cast a bit of doubt over whether they truly are back in business and they simply cannot allow the second half sloppiness they showed in Switzerland seep into Saturday’s game.

Manchester City’s eight point lead at the top of the table is not insurmountable but if that gap gets any bigger between now and the huge Manchester derby in just over a fortnight, United could be in a spot of bother.

? Potential upset: Burnley v Arsenal

Another club whose objective this weekend is to prove their last league result wasn’t a false dawn is Arsenal and if we’re being brutally honest, we’re not sure they have it in them.

Though their win at Turf Moor last season came courtesy of an injury time offside handball, the Gunners have a terrific Premier League record against the Clarets (P6 W5 D1) and the cliched notion of Arsène Wenger’s lily-livered players getting duffed up by Burnley’s brawn isn’t one that’s really rung true in the past.

But this time, we see things panning out differently. Sean Dyche’s charges are having a terrific season so far and have shown signs they’re slowly but surely becoming a very good football team as well as a physical one. Turf Moor is a tough place to go at the best of times and Arsenal wilting under the pressure of a fired up home crowd is far from the most surprising thing that could happen this weekend.

Then again, Wenger’s comments in the wake of his side’s defeat at Manchester City recently suggested he’s on the side of the statisticians when it comes to the great expected goals debate and he might therefore take heart from the fact that seventh-placed Burnley are currently bottom of the Premier League xG table.

We know what we’re expecting from this game though, and it isn’t an Arsenal victory.

? For the record

If Manchester City win away at Huddersfield on Sunday, they’ll set a new record for the most points gained by any side (37) after 13 matches of a Premier League season – beating the previous record, set by themselves, in 2011/12.

But if one statistic gives the Terriers hope of halting Pep Guardiola’s runaway locomotion it’s this: City haven’t won away at Huddersfield since January 1985.

Useless fact or genuine hoodoo? We shall see.

? We hope to see: Everton get their act together

Everton’s decision to part company with Ronald Koeman earlier this season was ostensibly the correct decision. Their results and performances had been terrible almost without exception up to that point and the Dutchman was showing no signs of being able to arrest the team’s decline.

But that was a month ago now and they’re still rubbish and seemingly no closer to appointing a new manager. Clearly, they got rid of Koeman without any idea who they’d get to succeed him and their results since then along with the frankly embarrassing failed attempt to pinch Marco Silva from Watford almost makes you wonder whether they might have been better off just sticking with the manager they had for a bit longer.

The Toffees are away to Southampton on Sunday and though we aren’t expecting them to have a new manager in place by then, they can’t keep waiting for that to happen before they start performing.

It’s still relatively early days, of course, but they’re currently only three points above the drop zone and definitely aren’t too good to go down.