Premier League Week 21: Liverpool Contain Arsenal; City Let Opportunity Slip; Chelsea Undo Themselves Once More
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Another red card decided Chelsea’s fate in a week where Arsenal failed to turn over a rejuvenated Liverpool, United underwhelmed, and Spurs descended into full-blown anarchy, writes Manik Sharma.
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United drop points despite Sesko’s welcome brace FORMER UNITED PLAYER and emergency manager Darren Fletcher looked on in exasperation as his side utterly dominated the game away to relegation-bound Burnley and yet found a way to spurn three deserved points. Secretly, though, Fletcher might have been relieved that he doesn’t have to shoulder the pressures of a job that likely no one wants in football at the moment. Off the pitch, United are a baffling mess: moneyless, structure-less and most alarmingly, ambitionless. On the pitch, they have swayed between hopeful and hopeless, and even though things seemed to be coming together lately — at least ideologically — the performances on the pitch remain wanting. If not for the wobbly mid-section of the league table this season, United, given their dourness, would have had to contemplate another bottom-half finish at the end of the season. More on their now-fired manager, later. Watch the match highlights here. |
City’s title challenge unravels in front of sparkly Brighton City’s resurgence has quickly turned into a backdoor emergency as solid form has given way to startling weaknesses at the back. City have now drawn three games on the trot. More importantly, they have squandered the opportunity to capitalise on Arsenal’s blips. The fact that City played against Brighton a day before Arsenal were to host Liverpool, and yet couldn’t muster a siege on their opponents’ goal, is telling of the weaknesses that have begun to re-emerge, after what felt like a brief segue to the domination of yesteryear. Both first-choice centre-backs, Gvardiol and Ruben Dias, are now injured, and even though Guardiola has beefed up his attack by adding the excellent Antoine Semenyo, scoring goals isn’t as much of a problem at the moment as preventing them. On the balance of the entire game, Brighton had the clearest of chances and could have, on another day, pinched all three points. For once in his managerial career, Guardiola might have to think defence-first, to be able to even push Arsenal, let alone dethrone them. WATCH | Man City vs Brighton highlights here. Spurs looking down after player anarchy kicks in Spurs are terrible to watch. Their attackers hardly inspire excitement. Their most thrilling play often comes from the lung-bursting runs of their Dutch centre-forward Micky Van De Ven, who won a penalty single-handedly against Bournemouth. And you can’t just tell the designs that Thomas Frank is working with behind the scenes, because none emerge on the pitch. Their victories seem as accidental as their losses feel grounded in cynical patterns. There is a startling lack of class and composure in the team, and the fact that club captain Christian Romero lashed out at the club hierarchy after another last-minute loss to a thrilling Bournemouth side, there seems to be little coherence either. Spurs are the league’s perennial underachievers, and Frank may soon pay the price for walking into a job where neither the specifics nor the speculation ever quite seem to meet. |
Chelsea see another red in defeat to Fulham A record eighth red card of the season — fifth in the Premier League — meant that Chelsea’s backs were against the wall against a perky Fulham side with one of the league’s in-form players in Harry Wilson, tormenting defenders left, right and centre. Up until Marc Cucurella’s sending-off in the 26th minute, Chelsea seemed fairly in control of the tie at Craven Cottage. Not for the first time this season, though, a poor decision in defence led to the Blues going a man down. Fulham sniffed their chance, and even though the Blues mounted a fightback in principle — Liam Delap scoring an encouraging equaliser — there was really only ever going to be one winner. Chelsea’s new manager, Liam Rosenoir, looked on from the stands, and though there were positives — as is the case these days with Chelsea — to take back from this loss, he must turn things around quickly to rescue a season that could easily fall apart over a month packed with key fixtures. WATCH | The Best Goals, the Best Saves and the Best Assists of Matchweek 21 here on JioHotstar, now available with your OTTplay Premium subscription. Liverpool hold lacklustre Arsenal to a spirited draw Draws rarely predicate titles, but if two dropped points were ever going to tip the balance of a tight title race, this draw against beleaguered Liverpool could come back to haunt Arsenal. In fact, the gunners looked surprised by Liverpool’s energy and resilience, to the point that their usually composed defence looked both shaky and unreliable. The Reds had the majority of the chances and should have taken home all three points as Arsenal toiled but failed to break their opponent’s resistance. Both attacks disappointed in bursts, but Arsenal’s storied bench, particularly, failed to lift a game that was asking to be won. This wasn’t a dull 0-0, but a frantic exchange of attacking thrust and individual talent that never quite materialised as a whole for either side. Gabriel Martinelli’s altercation with the injured Conor Bradley will make the headlines, but Mikel Arteta will rue the opportunity to open up a gap on City, a day after they slipped at home. Six points is still sizeable, but the Gunners could have squeaked clear on a day when their yet-to-be-unsleashed attack simply didn’t turn up. Watch the match highlights here. |
Postscript: Yet another bend in the Manchester United river as Ruben Amorim is shown the door Another manager has bitten the dust at Manchester United. No one can argue they didn’t see it coming, but Amorim strangely left at a time when he had begun to exhibit signs of flexibility. His unveiled, and possibly unplanned outburst at the club hierarchy last week notwithstanding, this is also a manager who has, for some time, looked like he wanted to be put out of his misery. Now that his wish has been granted — with a handsome payout — one of football’s most daunting jobs is looking for the next collar for a punitive leash. The squad is poor, the club is a shambles, and there is probably little to no money to spend for whoever chooses to pick up the slop. Absurdly, the name of former manager Ole Gunnar Solskjær has come up. Nothing could be more tragicomic for one of the sport’s most celebrated institutions than the narrative of only former players and possibly fans wanting to now turn up to save it from further ignominy. That, though, is the reality that Manchester United have to battle. Premier League matches come to you live and exclusive on JioHotstar, with an OTTplay Premium subscription for only Rs 149 per month. Don’t miss a minute! |
Parasakthi: The Revolution Has A Face, Not A Character
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Sudha Kongara gives her revolutionary a powerful outline — but withholds a complete shape, choosing symbolism and safety over political complication. Aditya Shrikrishna reviews.
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IN Parasakthi — the 2026 version, not the seminal 1952 Krishnan-Panju film written by M Karunanidhi — Sudha Kongara often films Sivakarthikeyan in silhouettes. We meet Chezhiyan (helpfully working as a Tamizh name as well as a call to a revolutionary like Che) in 1959, and what we first see is his outline amidst darkness as he holds an effigy (the language of Hindi anthropomorphised) and threatens to stop a train. It is an immersive entry for a hero in a film based on the anti-Hindi agitations of 1965 in the Madras state. We see him as a student leader, an activist and a revolutionary. And the silhouette gives him shape and form, but not characteristics. It centres the movement and students as its ultimate progenitors. But as far as Kongara’s screenplay (co-written with Arjun Nadesan) is concerned, it also restricts giving Chezhiyan something whole. Chezhiyan’s friend dies in the train fire, and almost in an instant, he gives it all up and puts an end to the Purananooru Squad (named after the Sangam anthology of poems that translates to four hundred poems in the puram genre), a shadow group of student leaders. We get the mechanics of this. We can see that the film wants us to briefly disengage with him and focus on the larger politics outside, and it will make for great dramatic tension if fate forces Chezhiyan back into his activism. That’s largely what happens in Parasakthi. We segue to 1964 to learn about his younger brother, Chinnadurai (Atharvaa), another loose cannon of an activist who is unaware of his elder brother’s past, and a brief romantic sidetrack with Ratnamala, played by Sreeleela. The expected narrative trampoline act transpires just before the intermission. Once again, we see Chezhiyan in silhouette, this time in broad daylight and therefore against the blinding rays of the sun (make of that image what you will!). Stream the latest Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada releases, with OTTplay Premium's Power Play monthly pack, for only Rs 149. |
The predictability is not the problem. We could perfectly imagine the whole film if we knew even the basic facts of the 1965 anti-Hindi agitations. It’s mainstream cinema’s compulsions that seem to dilute Parasakthi from what it could have been. After the spirited opening sequence, the story travels and stays in Madurai, where Chezhiyan works in the railways and lives with his grandmother. Ratnamala, their Telugu neighbour, is also part of Chinnadurai’s student politics and Chezhiyan today is a pale reflection of the man that he once was. He looks the other way from all irritation, asks Chinnadurai to only focus on education and even extracts a promise from his brother that he won’t go about setting fire to things. What's more, he is even ready to learn Hindi almost unflinchingly while always repeating that it’s Hindi imposition that Tamil people are against and not Hindi. Parasakthi is a film that doesn’t want to be messy; it wants to be that front bencher who is always trying to impress the teachers. It wants to be inclusive while being fictitious, co-opt all other language protests and display a more perfectly united face. It wants to insert a needless romance track that will seemingly appeal to the masses, studios and producers. It won’t make sense in the film and will remain inconsequential. But the film will play along. The sequence before the intermission, when students protest the Chief Minister’s inauguration of the Hindi week, is when things heat up again. We get why Chezhiyan will rise again, but if he was really an intelligent student as everyone claims, wouldn’t he have seen this coming? That thought swims in our heads throughout the film’s first half, all the way till the pre-interval sequence. Even here, the action leaves much to be desired. Kongara cuts quickly, the crowd shots are almost blink and miss, and even though the majestic presence of Chezhiyan ramps up the temperature, he doesn’t get a standout set piece. WATCH | Parasakthi audio launch is available to stream on SunNXT, now part of your OTTplay Premium subscription. |
It takes well into the second half for Parasakthi to learn the art of foreplay. What lacked uniform rhythm in the first half gets some sustained build-up towards action as we go from custodial torture to a Delhi episode in the middle of the road with Indira Gandhi (a bit of anachronism to up the stakes as Lal Bahadur Shastri was Prime Minister in 1965) to a climax that moves from Pollachi to Coimbatore in a train. The action is more streamlined here; we learn about the large wingspan of the Purananooru Squad, the Delhi episode, even if corny, works for its theatrical staging, and some of the quieter bits with other student leaders (the cameos are fun) and Kaali Venkat are fun. The train in the opening sequence also had Thiru (Ravi Mohan), a menacing state actor who's also KGB-trained and harbours fresh hatred for Tamil and every Tamizhan agitating against Hindi. He takes it upon himself to put an end to the menace, and Mohan is the surprise of Parasakthi. He is a man of action, one who wouldn’t flinch from adopting the violent methods that the British incorporated just over two decades before the events in this film. Mohan here is unlike any role he’s been in, sufficiently contorting his face at the Tamil language, permanently agitated at all that stands for it. Sivakarthikeyan, after a lacklustre Madharaasi, finds half a part in Chezhiyan and sinks his teeth into it. The results are mostly to his credit. |
This is a curious film. It wants to piggyback on its title (its original title, Purananooru, would have made a great one!), recalling a past work that the leaders of the Dravidian movement expressly created to propagate their progressive ideology. But it also wants to be the mainstream commercial Tamil film with its share of romantic track, songs and a melodramatic bone that turns towards personal tragedy for motivation. It has some tiny deft touches. Like the brothers pilfering the lighter from each other with arson as their preferred mode of agitation. Or Ratna’s stuttering in front of the radio mic giving way to a most graceful address in the end. A railway engine blowback becomes a Chekhov’s gun with two trains bookending the film itself. But like Chezhiyan’s characterisation, they don’t all amount to a satisfying whole. Watch Sivakarthikeyan's Doctor, Ethir Neechal and more with OTTplay Premium. Get JioHotstar, Discovery+, Zee5, Sony LIV, Fancode and 25+ OTTs for only Rs 149 per month. |
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