Many to most pundits were assuming that Manchester United would be in a title battle at this stage of the season with Jose Mourinho at the helm and more huge investment last summer.<\/p>\n
But far less were predicting a title charge from Chelsea who had suffered a really poor campaign under Mourinho and Guus Hiddink and looked as if they would need a season or two of transition to return themselves to the top.<\/p>\n
And when Chelsea lost 3-0 to Arsenal at the Emirates in the autumn there were already dismayed frowns on the brows of most Blues fans.<\/p>\n
The turnaround has been sensational since then. The uber-brave Antonio Conte chose that moment to revert to his 3-4-3 formation and Chelsea simply haven’t looked back. At the start of their magnificent run they dispatched Manchester United in a humiliating 4-0 defeat for Jose Mourinho’s new team and have since beaten them in the Fa Cup at Stamford Bridge too.<\/p>\n
But, despite the fact that Chelsea will be favourites to make it three in a row, TFF just can’t see Jose Mourinho allowing his old side to escape Old Trafford with three points.<\/p>\n
Even if Manchester United have to make a dirty scrap of it (and they may well do that) they will try to snatch the points by any means necessary.<\/p>\n
Manchester United’s strength has been their defence this season – only Tottenham have conceded less in the league and Ivory Coast defender Eric Bailly has been superb in his first season at the club – and they will need all their reserves to keep the free flowing Chelsea out.<\/p>\n
But we think that Zlatan will score for Manchester United who will scrape a 1-0 win and claim bragging rights, even if Chelsea do go on to win the title.<\/p>\n
TFF Prediction<\/strong><\/p>\n Manchester United 1 – 0 Chelsea <\/p>\n Zlatan 33 <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many to most pundits were assuming that Manchester United would be in a title battle at this stage of the season with Jose Mourinho at the helm and more huge investment last summer. But far […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":6047,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,586,4,582],"tags":[157,17],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8380"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8380"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8381,"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8380\/revisions\/8381"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}