Arsenal lead Manchester City by two points at the top of the Premier League with two matchdays remaining, an arithmetic situation that turns the May 19 Manchester City fixture against Bournemouth into the title's most likely decider. [1] A Bournemouth win at the Etihad — combined with Arsenal taking three points in either of their two remaining matches — hands Arsenal the championship without either contender requiring a second favourable result.

The race has, in other words, become a scoreboard problem rather than a fixture one. Arsenal's two May matches are at home; City must travel to a Bournemouth side that has spent the season playing as if a European place were on offer. Andoni Iraola's Cherries finished the Christmas window in the top six, and the Etihad has historically been the venue at which any Bournemouth result above a draw is treated as a structural event. Iraola has produced two such events this season.

What this means for the wider Premier League story is less the sporting upset — Arsenal have been good — than the symbolic one. City's run of titles has been the spine of the league's last decade. A break in that pattern, decided not at the Emirates but at the Etihad against a side built on the pressing template that Manchester City popularised, would be a small reversal. The kind of reversal that the league markets to itself.

Saturday's other matches — Liverpool at home to Crystal Palace, Chelsea travelling to Manchester United — affect Champions League qualification and not the title. Aston Villa's 4-2 at Anfield, covered at position 40 of this edition, rearranged that race. The top of the table is now a separate problem with its own arithmetic and one weekday fixture. That weekday is Tuesday.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London