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It’s the time of year known to all football fans as ‘the end of the domestic season’. Ordinarily these fans would expect a World Cup to follow but, given that in Doha temperatures are set to top 100 degrees Fahrenheit this week, it is not prudent to hold a football tournament in June and July. 

In 1970, Leeds United and Chelsea cancelled each other out at Wembley Stadium. A 2-2 draw in the FA Cup final after 120 minutes of football led to the first replay since before the Great War.

The Premier League approaches the final weekend with the long-awaited North London derby, which was postponed back in January due to an outbreak of COVID in the red team’s ranks. 

A departure for this week’s Charge Your Glasses piece as the focus is not on a club or a meeting between two old foes, but on a fixture in every football season: the UEFA Champions League semi-final.

This week sees the second leg of the semi-finals of European competition, which is also the subject of Wednesday’s piece on this site. Looking at the history of the game which decides the finalists, there have been plenty of exciting and invigorating matches and Manchester City have added their name to the rollcall.

They are called the Mackems because ‘we mack ‘em and you tack ‘em’ was a famous phrase when Sunderland was a shipbuilding city. Today, the football team can be found in the third tier of English football and on Netflix too.

It’s another European week, with the first leg of the semi-finals of the three main continental tournaments. Incredibly, though unsurprisingly, British clubs are represented in all three of them.

For at least a decade, the blockbuster fixture in the division pitted Arsenal against Manchester United. In 1996, Arsène Wenger was appointed as manager of his near namesake and within 18 months had turned the club around to such an extent that he won both the Premier League and the FA Cup.

The Battle of Merseyside is one of four games to take place on Sunday along with Brighton v Southampton, Burnley v Wolves and Chelsea v West Ham

Brighton have been a Premier League team since 2017, which means their meeting with Spurs will be their tenth in five years. The first, just before Christmas 2017, ended 2-0 to Spurs, with the return fixture a 1-1 draw.

Imagine if after 38 games of the Premier League season there was a sort of play-off between the top six and the bottom six and after five more games we would find out if Norwich really did get relegated or whether the chasing pack could catch Liverpool and Manchester City.

Away from London and the north-west, it can be argued that the Midlands is the other great hotbed of English football. As part of his series of books on English football’s ‘Turf Wars’