We're starting to feel sorry for Chelsea after latest woe with Joao Felix getting sent off against Fulham - The Warm-Up

"Look at that. You couldn't write it." You hear this a lot in football. Often it's not precisely true - even the most mundane of scriptwriters could probably stretch their imagination to an injury-time winner - but that isn't really the point. Instead, it's a way for football commentators to congratulate themselves and all their listeners on their wise decision to watch sport, both today and in general. This funny or heartbreaking or narratively pleasing thing really did just happen spontaneously, out of the real-time whirl of chance and human endeavour. You made the right call! Hooray for sport!

So, Joao Felix coming in to Chelsea on loan to moderate fanfare, playing really well for a half, and then copping himself a red card and a three-match ban for one of the season's dafter tackles? You could write it. Sure. But you might not, because it would be terribly cruel.

That's right, Chelsea are at the "oh, what a pity" stage. We don't like it as much as you don't like it, but we don't make the rules. There's Graham Potter, standing on the sidelines, staring with the untethered intensity of a man who can feel the water coming into his shoes but really cannot deal with another problem right now. There's Kalidou Koulibaly, clearing the ball into touch off Trevoh Chalobah's face. There's Kepa Arrizzabalaga, coming for the cross, not coming for the cross, yes, no, oh. Oh no.

There are objectively worse defences in the Premier League, but there aren't many so fundamentally nervous as Chelsea's. Thiago Silva still maintains a veneer of competence, but all around him is extreme twitchiness; an ancient lighthouse standing above a raging sea. Perhaps this is just what happens when a coach arrives with new methods but has to keep changing formation due to injury and panic, while everybody's simultaneously down on form and confidence. It's quite mesmerising to watch.

And yet Chelsea played quite well! Going forward, that is. In moments. Until, you know. This hasn't always been the case during Potter's early weeks, but here they were moving with menace and getting their shots away. Felix, starting as the central striker but with licence to roam, really did look like a useful addition: he has that ability to generate power from a low backlift that makes all strikers more dangerous. But you can't spend too long with Diego Simeone without developing a taste for violence.

And Fulham are exactly the kind of team to petrify this Chelsea defence. They are, if you'll forgive a momentary lapse into car speak, lovely little movers. Quick combinations down the flanks, and Andreas Pereira finally living up to the promise of his eyebrows. Exactly the team you don't want to see if your defence has all the poise of a room full of toddlers, and your shiny new signing is about to welcome himself to the Premier League.

You could call it a panic move. You could laugh at the fact that Erik ten Hag's solution to Cristiano Ronaldo leaving is to find somebody a little bit taller and considerably more Dutch. And you can almost hear the list pieces of the future being written: so where do we put Wout Weghorst, in this list of Manchester United's weirdest signings? Just above Angel di Maria?

But the job of the Warm-Up is to challenge your preconceptions. What if we told you that this deal, if it happens, is not in fact Manchester United panicking. What if we went further, and suggested that this is the calmest piece of transfer business that Manchester United have done in some time. What if we blew your mind.

It all depends [we might say, in a smug tone of voice] on what you think United are buying here. Goals? Assists? Statistically important contributions? Well, maybe. Weghorst is certainly an interesting big man, as big men go, one who does a fair amount of pressing and quite likes playing football. You know, with his feet. And if nothing else, he's another presence for Christian Eriksen to aim at from dead balls.

But we reckon United are buying not goals, but something even precious: time. At a basic level, minutes for Weghorst up front are minutes that Martial can spend resting and that Rashford can spend either resting or cutting in from the left. If all Weghorst achieves on the pitch is allowing his new team-mates a little more time off it, that's job at least half done.

Perhaps more importantly, he buys United time to properly answer the question of how to replace Ronaldo. He gives United a full half-season to identify, scout, double-scout and triple-scout every striker in the world; to tell their agents to get lost and to go crawling back; to get gazumped by Chelsea and move on. There are no guarantees in the transfer market, and that counts twice for this most erratic of superclubs. But a sticking plaster now gives United a better chance of proper restorative surgery come the summer, when if all remains on track, they'll be able to say "come and play Champions League football under our amazing new coach". (We may wish to revisit that sentiment after the derby.)

Of course, if United were a well-run club, then they would already have their targets identified, already be halfway through the negotiations, and already have the money accounted for in the budget. But United, generally speaking, are only just showing the first signs of something that might, in the fullness of time, begin to look a bit like competence. And in those circumstances, this all makes calm and sensible sense.

A shame for Ansu Fati. Here he is, scoring a lovely goal in the 93rd minute, and yet it's almost impossible to appreciate it. Because as soon as the camera cuts in close, your brain short-circuits and starts screaming. "The shorts! The socks! What are they doing?!"

It's like one of those kids' books with the flaps, where you can make a figure with the head of a pirate, the body of an astronaut and the legs of a dinosaur. Top half Barcelona, bottom half a hooky Liverpool kit. No wonder Betis lost concentration at the crucial moments.

There have been all sorts of tributes to Gareth Bale over the last few days, as befits the retirement of somebody so ridiculously good. But being a little biased, we particularly liked this, from Elis James for the Guardian, which tackles not only Bale's excellence but his Welshness, and how he elevated supporting Wales from a desperate pursuit into something glorious.

"He means everything to Welsh people because for the past 10 years or so he’s provided a bulletproof shorthand to explain where we are from, as football stardom permeates corners of the globe that no other sport can reach, and that even Hollywood fame or pop music finds difficult to compete with. He has done far more to put Wales on the map than any individual in my lifetime."

During the 2014 World Cup, your Warm-Up correspondent was walking through the Copacabana fan zone wearing a Wales shirt. A large Brazilian man wearing a Fluminese shirt bowled over to intercept us, and started jabbing at the badge, at the dragon. "Wales!" he said, grinning. "Wales!" We agreed enthusiastically - "Wales!" - knowing for certain that he was about to say "Bale!" And he stepped back, opened his arms wide and shouted: "Craig Bellamy!"

Over to the Athletic now, where Daniel Taylor has an in-depth interview with Moses Swaibu, formerly of Crystal Palace, Lincoln City and Bromley. Swaibu was jailed in 2015 for charges relating to match-fixing, and is now working to raise awareness among young players. Here he is recounting the first time he was offered money to fix a game, while playing at Lincoln.

"[Delroy Facey] called me and a few of the other lads into a room. There was another guy there, too. The guy turned round and said, 'Look, you’ve got a match tomorrow, this is what I want the score to be. There’s some money here for you and, if the fix comes in, everyone gets paid'. The money got pulled out. Sixty grand, in Euros. He put it on the bed and everyone just looked at each other."

Swaibu didn't bite then, but he didn't report the approach either. Later, while at Bromley, he started taking the money: "I wasn’t in any financial need. It was more about a level of respect. I never got paid for three and a half months, not that it’s an excuse." And he suggests that it's rife, though certainly not scattershot. The fixers know which players are vulnerable to their approaches.

"They know more about you than you probably know about yourself: where you’ve been, what you do in your social life, do you gamble? They know your weaknesses, your strengths. They have a KYC (Know Your Customer) based around you, even before they approach you."

It's an absolutely massive one in Italy this evening. Napoli vs. Juventus, first against second. A home win stretches the gap to 10 points, while an away win slashes it to just four - can we call that a championship six-pointer? We can! And we will! Also, Leeds are away at Villa.