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Key events
Chelsea’s young players will form a guard of honour for Liverpool tomorrow. Jacob Steinberg has been looking at what Enzo Maresca and friends can learn from the champions.
Chelsea, who have the second-youngest squad across Europe’s top five leagues and are monitoring the 19-year-old Ajax left-back Jorrel Hato, should take note. They will give Liverpool a guard of honour at Stamford Bridge on Sunday afternoon and face a team with stability at their core. Van Dijk, now 33, is still the defensive rock and has signed on for two more years. Alisson, at 32, remains one of the best goalkeepers in the world. It is a simple equation: buying the best usually makes you the best.
Barney’s regular Saturday column is about a young man who, on Wednesday night, came agonisingly close to breaking the internet
Lamine Yamal was the buildup, the takeaway and also the TV commentary to this game, which for long periods was just Rio Ferdinand saying “OH MY GOD” a lot. In the second half you kept having to check the score to make sure it wasn’t actually 6-1 to Barcelona (Lamine Yamal 6), as opposed to a 3-3 draw and a good away result for Inter.
On this weekend five years ago there was no football, just Covid and a whole lotta fear. Barney Ronay has been looking at how the pandemic changed sport – for richer and poorer.
The pandemic had a start date. But the closest we got to a national throwing-off of the shackles, our own VV day, was July 2021 and the sight of a lone England football supporter placing a flare between his buttock cheeks before releasing it into the air of central London. This was our healing moment, our iconography of closure, our own white cliffs and union flags.
This morning’s headlines
Preamble
Hello and welcome to live coverage of another super soccer-filled Saturday. This is our home for all the latest news and previews ahead of today’s action, which begins at 12.30pm with Aston Villa v Fulham and the last day of the regular Championship season. Then we have the final round of fixtures in Leagues One and Two, plus Bayern Munich’s chance to win back the Bundesliga after a shocking one-season drought.
At 11am we’ll have a special Q&A with Ben Fisher, who knows more about the Football League than 99.82 per cent of sentient beings, so please send in any questions for that. You can contact us at matchday.live@theguardian.com or post below the line.
Before we get started, these are some of the key matches we’ll be following today.
Premier League
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Aston Villa v Fulham (12.30pm)
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Everton v Ipswich (3pm)
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Leicester v Southampton (3pm)
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Arsenal v Bournemouth (5.30pm)
Championship (all 12.30pm)
Bundesliga
League One (3pm)
League Two (3pm)
You can peruse a fuller fixture list here.
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