Manchester City might have laid an almighty haymaker into Arsenal on Sunday, but the Premier League's title bout is far from won yet. Indeed, it looks like this is going all the way to the bell.
As it stands, City's 2-1 win means the title is in their hands, three points behind the leaders with a game in hand -- as it is in Arsenal's. Or is it in neither side's? After all, neither can quite control their own destiny. If both win their remaining games -- Pep Guardiola's side have six, one more than the Gunners -- the title will be decided by goal difference. A split decision if ever there was one.
No wonder there is so little agreement over who is going to emerge as the champion. The bookmakers see City's fine run down the stretch and Arsenal's wobble and make them favourites with an implied probability of around 60%. The prediction models see the broad sweep of the season and are a bit more keen on Mikel Arteta. Opta make them winners in 73% of their 10,000 simulations and analytic.football picks them 66% of the time. One pundit will tell you Arsenal are going to win out and hold on, another that City have that sort of run in them.
City have momentum. Arsenal have points on the board and a fixture list entirely made up of teams who are currently in the bottom half.
Which way does it go? Your guess is as good as mine. And here, in fact, is mine. Let's dive into the remaining fixtures and see where we land.
The only way this game could be more ideal for City is if it happened to take place at the Etihad. This is a chance not just for Guardiola's men to claim top spot, but to take a sizeable goal difference lead. Burnley are, by far, the worst defense in the league, taking on a side whose attack have averaged nearly two expected goals per game since the start of February. There is nothing left for Burnley to play for but delaying the inevitable. This could get heavy.
For Arsenal, this could be the game that defines their season. Fail to beat Newcastle, and the doom spiral begins, the bottler narrative ringing altogether truer than it did after the Etihad, when the visitors gave it a really good go in vain.
Then again, that is the other takeaway from Sunday. Arsenal might have lost, but they found a way to play notably better against City than they had earlier in their wobble period. Martin Odegaard was back, Kai Havertz was fit enough to lead the line, and they were winning the ball back, establishing their press and asking serious questions of Gianluigi Donnarumma. Suppose that Jurrien Timber and Riccardo Calafiori, both of whom were close to recovering for the last game, return to add a bit more balance from full back, let alone Bukayo Saka. Newcastle are in a spiral of their own, and although they tend to up their game against Arsenal, they might not have the quality to match the Gunners at full strength.
This might be the best occasion for Arsenal to apply real pressure on Manchester City. Assuming they beat Newcastle they will be back where they were after the Etihad and the visit of Fulham will afford them a chance to go six points clear ahead of a City game with two games in hand. Marco Silva's men are a bit of a tough out for Arsenal and have taken points in four of their last nine league meetings. At home against a team that is currently winless in four? Surely they get the job done.
And so to the Hill Dickinson and the first of three games that on paper look like the ones where City might come undone. Under the lights, with an opponent who might still be dreaming of Europe. The defense looks great of late, but if the xG trend lines are to be believed, there's a chance for good teams with good attackers to make something happen here. Contrary to what you might instinctively believe, David Moyes' Everton are one of those teams.
It could happen. But it probably won't. Monday night games for Everton aren't particularly appealing now that we're up to seven of them this season. If there's anything special about Monday's in footballing terms, Everton's record this season is one win, three draws, two defeats in the league, a minus one goal difference, and a -4.1 xG difference. This feels very Antoine Semenyo winner and City hold on smartly.
Manchester City 1, Brentford 1West Ham 2, Arsenal 2
Since promotion, Brentford's record against Manchester City probably is not quite as impressive as you think it is. Then again, given the financial chasm between them, two wins and a draw from nine games is not to be sniffed at for the Bees. Even in defeat, they have frequently pushed City close, and it is plausible that Igor Thiago, Dango Ouattara, and Michael Kayode give their hosts plenty of issues on the counter and through dead balls.
Perhaps it won't be this game. Maybe City will slip at Everton or Bournemouth. Part of the reason that prediction models are so bullish on Arsenal's chances will surely be that they look at those three games against very decent outfits and doubt any team could get nine points in this Premier League. The chance will be there for Arsenal.
If they're to blow it, they will probably do so at the London Stadium. West Ham have greatly improved in pursuit of survival and at this point in the season, that will probably still be a very live issue. If things have gone very well for Nuno Espírito Santo and very badly for Tottenham, maybe the stakes of this game change, but that seems unlikely. What seems probable is that this will be the game that Arsenal know they must win, the one that could define their season, five days after the second leg of a Champions League semifinal. And look, much as I hate this sort of analysis, until I've seen Arsenal deliver three points in one of those games that decide a title, I have my doubts.
Arsenal 4, Burnley 0Bournemouth 1, Manchester City 2
Going into this game, everything will be ludicrously tight. Arsenal's goal difference will be plus-40, City's plus-41. This will be the game where Arteta has to go for the big win, and it is worth saying that no team in the Premier League has as many big wins as the Gunners this season. It is worth saying at this juncture that they are the only team to have won by a five-goal margin this season, and only they and City have two games won by four-plus goals. This can be done. It will have to be.
That might mean Arsenal, with all the best attacking talent they can muster, a team that can dominate territory and then turn that into lots of shots and goals. It might be a game for Viktor Gyokeres, whose best moments have come against the league's lesser lights. It might be by then that this team has found more of a groove around Kai Havertz, whose five shots against Manchester City is as many as Gyokeres has managed in 558 league minutes against the division's top six.
What we don't know at this point is where exactly the game will land on the calendar versus City's trip to Bournemouth. That will not be confirmed until after the FA Cup semifinal next week, where you would expect Southampton to come unstuck to Premier League royalty. That will mean this week will be the final for Pep Guardiola and Bournemouth would have to move in the calendar, perhaps ahead, given that there is another game to be jammed in and European semifinal considerations for Crystal Palace.
As for the game itself, this will be really tough. City's defeat at the Vitality Stadium last season was the start of the almighty collapse. That was, however, a different City and a different Bournemouth. The latter's press will create issues and if the injuries of Rodri, Ruben Dias and John Stones are persisting by then those issues might be unanswerable. And yet one of Guardiola's many under-appreciated qualities is that he gets his best guys on the pitch down the stretch. Until proven otherwise, assume that will continue.