Wayne Rooney believes upcoming games between Arsenal and Manchester City shall be the decisive consider this season’s title race.
Arsenal’s surprising midweek draw against bottom-of-the-table Wolves has made the Premier League title race all of the more interesting.
And while the Gunners still lead by just five points over Manchester City, they’ve played a game greater than Pep Guardiola’s side and face a possible banana skin in Sunday’s north London derby.
City, meanwhile, are riding high off 4 consecutive wins in all competitions, and will pile on the pressure on Mikel Arteta’s side with a victory over Newcastle United on Saturday.
There is no such thing as a doubt set to be more twists and turns in the approaching matches, but all eyes are already turning to a key few weeks, starting next month, when each side face one another on several occasions in quick succession.
March’s Carabao Cup final will see Arsenal and City come head to head, before the 2 sides head to the Etihad for an enormous league clash in mid-April.
And in between that, the highest two sides within the league could also face off in a Champions League quarter-final first leg if each make it through their respective round-of-16 ties.
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And five-time Premier League Rooney believes those stretch of games will hold the important thing to the title race.
‘I feel an enormous factor goes to be in the event that they meet within the Champions League,’ he said on the Wayne Rooney Podcast.
‘The emotion around them games, and the Carabao Cup final and the sport on the Etihad [in the league], the emotion around them games and what that may bring, whoever comes out on top in those will win the league.’
And asked to stay his neck on the road and make a title prediction, Rooney said: ‘I feel Arsenal. Just.’
Not everyone was keen to bask in title talk this week, though, with Guardiola batting away several questions from reporters in his press conference on Friday.
‘Twelve [more] games is rather a lot, like I said before. So Newcastle is my only concern,’ the City boss said.
‘We shall be concerned in regards to the League cup final against Arsenal when it’s coming up, but for now it’s Newcastle, a rest and after it Leeds. It has all the time been like that.
‘As a journalist, I understand you would like to anticipate what will occur. That doesn’t count. It’s Newcastle, that’s all.’
Arteta, meanwhile, said his side had moved on from Wednesday’s disappointing result and were now full concentrate on putting things right against Spurs on Sunday.
‘What I actually have seen is a tremedous response and no surprise in any respect,’ he said. ‘If you lose points in a really unpredictable manner, isn’t any one can really understand that.
‘That was a chapter, chapter 27 says we draw against Wolves in this way, what I’m intrested in is the following one. Writing our own destiny, life moves on.’
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