Two months, two teams, one winner: Premier League title race starts here

I t has been a Premier League season of distractions, pop-up windows and one vast and disorientating hiatus. Exactly 34 weeks have passed since Arsenal kicked things off with a Friday night trip to Crystal Palace, a week before temperatures in London hit 34 degrees, four months before Lionel Messi was draped in a propaganda cape in Qatar, a month before Liz Truss was sworn in as temp-to-perm prime minister. Is that story still this story? Is there an actual narrative arc here? Did somebody win the league in between and we’ve all just forgotten and carried on?

The good news, as March folds into April, is that we do now have some clarity. After that hungover summer start; after the fever dream of a northern winter World Cup, an entirely disjointed digression like an hour-long magic realist segue in an annoying arthouse film; after the jet-lagged Christmas restart, and now the weary what-now of a spring international break. After all that, the season is now primed not just for a genuine title race, but for an uncluttered run to the finish.

The set-up is good from here. There are 10 games remaining for the league leaders, 11 for their main pursuers, without breaks or interjections or anything to break the concentration. By happy coincidence this comes as the league still has what is, because of the nature of the participants, a genuine two-way title race.

The next four weeks will bring four key story beats, the same names revolving and colliding through an epic-looking April, the title race equivalent of the hot zone in a game of Pacman, where suddenly the lights flash, the clock starts to tick and it becomes a chase to the death.

This process starts this Saturday, 1 April, with Manchester City at home to Liverpool, a