Chelsea will be rubbing their hands with glee after the only two games of Premier League action this weekend resulted in draws for their nearest challengers.

Manchester United faced a tricky match away to an in-form Birmingham City. Ferguson has suggested that the one all draw was a good result, but the truth of the matter is that a team looking to retain or win the title should really be taking maximum points from fixtures such as this. Regardless of the form of Birmingham, the fact remains that their remarkable run of unbeaten games (12 now) has to come to a close at some stage. United played will in the opening half and in truth they were horrendously unlucky to find themselves a goal behind at the interval, with Birmingham scoring from their first attack of note. What should be encouraging is that in the majority of Uniteds defeats this season they have failed to create any real chances. Even when they were behind here, they created plenty and that is a positive.

For Birmingham we saw exactly what their fantastic run has been built on - defence. In the first half especially, every United attack seemed to end with a City player throwing themselves in front of the ball. It was block after block after block. Tremendous defending - it was like playing against a defence of Jamie Carraghers. In the second half we saw a different side to them as they called the United keeper into action on a number of occasions and indeed finished the game the stronger of the two sides (though Fletchers relatively soft red card may have influenced this somewhat).

Arsenal were the benefactors of two huge slices of luck in their match at home to Everton. Finding themselves behind twice (to two excellent Everton goals - Pienaar's in particular was a wonderful finish), they required two deflected equalisers to claw a point from the game, one of these coming in stoppage time. Everton will count themselves as unlucky to concede the goals in the manner that they did but there was much to be admired about their performance, including an impressive debut from Donovan. Wenger was delighted with the point - and in the context of the game and the performance he is probably correct to be, though in the overall scheme of the Premier League title race this will more than likely be remembered as two points dropped.

Finally, it would be remiss to talk about this weekend's action (well what sparse action there was) and not briefly discuss the incident in Africa. It is no surprise that the Togo national team have pulled out of the African Cup Of Nations. No tournament is worth the suffering that they went through on Saturday. Who would have thought that a bus carrying a team of footballers would provoke such premeditated gunfire? Incidents such as this have to raise serious quesion marks around the organisation and safety offered to the teams and players in Angola. And while the ACON is the concern at the moment....the greatest show on Earth is taking place this Summer in South Africa. One wonders what effect this incident will have on the preparation for the World Cup. Security efforts will have to be stepped up. This cannot be allowed to happen again.