Sunday is the biggest Premier League game of the season so far.
The 4pm Super Sunday games feels like an echo of the duopoly years, when Ferguson and Wenger battled to win the title back off each other.
But Arsenal v Manchester United comes just after Olympiakos have unexpectedly won 3-2 at the Emirates Stadium.
And just after Manchester United have gone top last weekend by beating Sunderland 3-0 at Old Trafford.
Wayne Rooney, who has often been Arsenal’s nemesis in this fixture, may not be a significant influence on Sunday afternoon.
Poor old Wayne’s slowed down and become peripheral these days, as Louis Van Gaal has quickly collaged a different style of play with a new attacking axis.
What matters right now is the M-Factor: Mata, Memphis and Martial.
Memphis Depay is a right-footed left winger who plays high, Martial is a teenage powerhouse who has been a revelation at No.9, and Mata is a floating touch player who can flick the ball into their runs and score a few himself.
Gary Neville says that he’s seen all three of Manchester United’s home games in the league.
In one of those matches, he wasn’t commentating, so he was able to watch Martial specifically.
He was surprised, saying that Martial’s close control is superb, that big centrebacks bounce off him, that he can turn and go and score.
On ITV, after the Olympiakos shambles, Roy Keane said, “They’e soft, Arsenal are soft. They’re weak., the goals they give away. Two set-pieces again. you’ve got no chance of winning any big game if you defend like that. There’s certainly a weakness to the group. They lack characters, leaders and winners.”
His co-pundit Lee Dixon, who played for Wenger, said, “When they haven’ got the ball, I don’t think they know where to be.”
Who could argue with straight talk like that? Not me.
I now see Arsenal as a squad of nearly-men, led by a very clever salesman who doesn’t teach defence.
In The Times today, Oliver Kay’s piece Time to end the whining and fix European woes kicks off by saying that : Excuses about fixture congestion are just that as cash generation dominates the agenda.
This excellent Big Pictur piece concludes:
There is no catch-all explanation why English teams are underperforming in Europe.
They are all, to varying degrees, in a state of transition, but equally they reflect a culture in which money — making money, spending money, watching the asset grow — weighs too heavily. Money matters in Spain and Germany, too, where the interests of the very biggest clubs, who dominate the broadcast-rights pool, have come to distort competition. We should be grateful that things are shared out a little more fairly in the Premier League, but one cannot help thinking that the greatest leveller in English football is that, at some of those elite clubs, an obsession with money has led them to take at least one eye off the ball.
Exactly right, I’d say.
The Arsenal Corporation is all about money $$$$$$ money.
While loyal Gooners invariably give the club the benefit of the doubt, John Silton and thousands like him have given up years ago.
Their seats have been mostly sold to Sky-era customers who believe the hype and will never see the ArseneSilentStan corporation for what it is.
Wenger’s value is that he’s always delivered his budget by making big bucks from playing at least six or eight games in the lucrative and entirely misnamed Champions League.
But 2016 might be the first year that Wenger doesn’t deliver the budget that the Corporation is based on.
For Sunday, Louis Van Gaal has already hinted that he might rest a few players.
Even if he does that, I reckon Arsenal could get battered.
Man United are top and want to stay top.