The North London derby is going to be brilliant and you should watch it

Tottenham Hotspur visit Arsenal this coming Sunday, and it’s going to be great. Seriously. We at SB Nation Soccer are a cynical bunch, but in this instance the evidence is overwhelming. This is going to be one of the hottest games of the season and you should be watching it. For three reasons:

The first thing we should acknowledge is that at a fundamental level, watching top level football is about watching footballers do things. Good things, bad things, funny things, extraordinary things, inexplicable things. It’s about watching the very best in the world try to live up to their abilities, and either succeed or make an unholy mess in failing.

What luck, then, that the North London derby presents us with a collection of footballers specifically calculated to be either brilliant or interestingly bad. Even the goalkeepers are entertaining. Petr Cech is a kind of aging, noble bear of a man — a bear that has fought many great battles and slain many valiant salmon — and is still going out there, day after day, throwing his big paws around.

A little slower than before, perhaps, and a little less secure. At times, you can almost see the thought You know, I could be hibernating right now glittering behind his eyes. But he’s still among the finest salmon-catchers around. Hugo Lloris, by contrast, is a squirrel. The defenses and the destructive aspects of the midfields are notionally secure but haunted by the prospect of calamity, which is ideal for the neutral.

Then there’s the joyous collection of humanity that is the creative midfield options on both sides. Christian Eriksen, Alexis Sanchez, Alex Iwobi, Dele Alli, Son Heung-Min: these are all people that have it in them to make your day better just by doing what they do. Most delightful of all is Mesut Ozil, who has finally realized that kicking the ball into the goal is a much more reliable method of scoring than kicking the ball to another Arsenal player somewhere near the goal.

Even better, there are a few delicious doubts. Arsenal will be missing the adorable Santi Cazorla and up front Arsene Wenger has to decide whether to go with a proper striker in Olivier Giroud or a proper footballer in Alexis Sanchez. Meanwhile Mauricio Pochettino has to recalibrate his defense thanks to Toby Alderweireld’s injury and Wednesday’s nightmare against Bayer Leverkusen. Erik Lamela is missing, and while Harry Kane will apparently be in the squad, he’s been absent for more than a month.

So who starts: the unfit Kane, the ineffective Vincent Janssen, or the not-actually-a-striker Son? In short, both managers have big calls to make. And when managers have big calls to make, managers sometimes make the wrong call. And then — oh rhapsody, oh blessing, oh pleasure beyond all other pleasures — we get to call them a fraud.

In a general sense, here we have a clash between two teams who are, at a fundamental level, built to win games. Spurs are constructed to harry the opposition high, applying systematic and intense pressure until the ball finds its way into the net. Whereas this season’s Arsenal have, in attack, been a feast of unpredictable angles and surging runs.

So if you’ll permit a little theoretical speculation, we could end up with a highly pleasing contrast of styles. If Tottenham manage to get their pressing game going and keep Arsenal penned into their own half, then they’ll generate chances for themselves. If Arsenal slip the press or snuff out the chance, then they’ll have opportunities to sweep up the other end.

In both cases, the poor full-backs will have a ridiculous amount of running to do, and at least one defensive midfielder will pick up an awkward yellow card within the first 15 minutes. Then he’ll get a strong talking-to moments into the second half. And then, finally, he’ll commit his third bookable offense and earn his dismissal just after the hour mark. Our money’s on Granit Xhaka.

However, Tottenham’s form is something of a concern here. Though they were excellent against Manchester City, their attack has been stuttering ever since. Son has slipped out of his purple patch and Janssen has labored in place of Kane. If Kane’s not fit to start, they may try to shift things about a bit, to play more on the break. But without Alderweireld, they may not have the platform to do so.

Cliché insists that in a derby, the form book goes out of the window. And while that may not quite be true in the case of the North London derby, it does seem that of all the SUPERMASSIVE DERBY CLASHES that the modern Premier League loves to get hot and bothered about, the North London derby is the one that most reliably delivers the hype-promised combination of intensity, nonsense, and unpredictability. Perhaps that’s because Jose Mourinho hasn’t gotten around to ruining this one.

Last time out, for example, Spurs went one down in the first half, took the lead on the hour with two goals in two minutes, and then Arsenal’s Francis Coquelin was sent off for essentially being a buffoon. So, naturally, Arsenal sliced right through Tottenham late on to earn a 2-2 draw. But really, we could have picked any game at random from recent years, and almost certainly find something fun in there.

We’ve had ridiculously brilliant goals from sources both unlikely (David Bentley, Danny Rose) and predictable (Thierry Henry); asinine red cards (Coquelin, Emmanuel Adebayor); iconic celebrations (Henry); inexplicable comebacks; and perhaps the politest piece of provocation ever recorded when Theo Walcott, sitting up in a stretcher, his cheeks radiating Sunday School innocence and his leg in pieces, gently mimed “2-0” to the crowd.

We’ve also had goals. Lots and lots of lovely goals. This is a fixture that has, since the turn of the millennium, seen more 5-2s than it has 0-0s.

Taking all of the above into account, we can now conclude that the game has been well and truly jinxed. Lump on the world’s first one-all draw, and thank us later.