Premier League & FA Cup
English club football: the title races, the verdicts and the matches that decided them.
The Interlull That Wasn't
Three weeks without Premier League football should have been the quietest stretch of the autumn, until a report on Manchester City's 115 charges left the paused table under a question nobody can yet answer.
Curtain Raiser
The Community Shield is the fixture everyone agrees not to count. Only a quarter of its winners go on to lift the league, and the venue itself had been given away to a pop concert. But a curtain raiser was never meant to tell you how the play ends. It was meant to show you the cast.
8,060 Days
Arsenal are Premier League champions for the first time since 2004. The title was confirmed on Bournemouth's pitch, in Bournemouth's game, decided by Bournemouth's teenager. The wait is over. It does not feel the way anyone expected it to feel.
One More to Go
Arsenal beat Burnley 1-0 at the Emirates. Havertz headed in Saka's corner. The margin between where Arsenal are and where they could have been was, at several points on Monday night, almost nothing at all.
One in a Hundred
Antoine Semenyo's backheel in the 72nd minute won Manchester City the FA Cup. It was the only thing that happened all afternoon. It was enough.
Wembley, Again
Manchester City are in their fourth consecutive FA Cup final. No club has ever done that. They have also lost the last two. Today, against Chelsea, both of those things are true at once.
A Game of Chicken
Manchester City are two points behind Arsenal with ten days left. Pep Guardiola is still pressing the accelerator. Nobody has turned the wheel yet.
Four Minutes and Seventeen Seconds
The VAR decision that disallowed West Ham's equalizer against Arsenal was correct. That is almost beside the point.
Nervous Nineties
The Premier League is in an idiom borrowed from another sport. Five teams know exactly what it means.
The Imitation Game
Five games left. A game in hand. At the Etihad today, Guardiola is closing the way he always closes. The question — again — is whether Arteta has an answer.