One of the problems of playing football in a pandemic is that you are never sure what is going to
happen over the next few days, as was proven last week with Aston Villa’s entire first team squad being forced to isolate for their game with Liverpool. This meant Dean Smith had to play effectively a youth team for their game against a near full-strength Liverpool.
Obviously, had this been apparent when I wrote the tips, I wouldn’t have backed a Villa win. But it does go to show just how tricky things are at the moment as not only have their been a lot more ‘surprise’ results this season, but you are also having to contend with these external factors too in what are very worrying times for teams.
Regardless, the Premier League continues this week with a selection of midweek games. It is actually half of the games from Matchday 18 (the other half of the games are to be played next week in midweek too, after Matchday 19 confusingly!) plus a game postponed from earlier in the season (Burnley v Manchester United).
Most teams in the Premier League will have taken the opportunity to rest a number of key players over the past FA Cup Third Round weekend, so it is going to be interesting to see if we see an uplift in performances from certain teams now that players have had a little rest, probably for the first time since the start of the season.
There’s some big games this week at the top of the table with Man City, Man Utd, Tottenham and Everton all in action, while Liverpool sit things out this week knowing that by the weekend they may no longer be atop of the Premier League. It should make for a very interesting set of games this week.
Here’s the four games I’ve selected for my acca this week.
