With crowds down, incidents of violence in the stadiums and on the pitch seemingly on the rise, and players hitting the headlines on the front pages as much as the back, is the Premiership losing its lustre? Scott Wilson and Adam Murray argue for and against.

Anyone who thinks the Premiership bubble has burst clearly wasn't at Highbury on August 22. If they had have been then, like me, they would have seen the kind of football match that only England's leading league is capable of producing.

Frenetic action and eight goals in a state of the art stadium packed with passionate fans from either club, a game that swung one way then the other with the outcome in doubt to the end, and some of the best footballers in the world relishing the chance to put their talents on display.

A once in a lifetime opportunity? Not if you're watching the Premiership, because there'll be another great game along in a minute.

What about Newcastle 4 Manchester City 3? The defending might not have been too clever but, for edge-of-the-seat excitement, it doesn't get much better than Craig Bellamy's last-minute winner.

And that's why the Premiership remains as popular as ever. Every time you go through the turnstiles, you know you've got a good chance of some thrills and spills.

While other footballing cultures are driven by results, English fans demand entertainment and, more times than not, the Premiership delivers.

Early season attendances might be slightly down - partly attributable to the fact that most of the top teams are still to play each other and that the newly-promoted sides do not have the same capacity as Leeds and Leicester who dropped out of the top-flight last year - but English football remains on the crest of a wave compared to its continental cousins.

In the games played so far this season, English grounds have been, on average, 93 per cent full. Compare that with the second-best figure for a major European league - the German Bundesliga's 73 per cent - and you see that talk of a crisis of confidence is severely misplaced.

Nobody is pretending that the Premiership is perfect. Ticket prices remain high, although when Madonna can charge £175 for a 90-minute concert, asking for £35 to see Manchester United take on Arsenal does not seem too excessive.

There also remains a degree of predictability about the league but, again, this needs to be kept in perspective.

Three teams have a realistic chance of winning the Premiership at the moment - a figure that is comparable to all of Europe's leading leagues. At the other end of the table, all three newly-promoted clubs have a genuine chance of disproving the theory that the relegation spots are filled before a ball is kicked.

Not all games live up to their billing - the aforementioned 'Battle of Old Trafford' is a case in point - but that game underlines the final reason why the Premiership is still as relevant as ever.

We talk about it. We might not even want to - but, as a nation, we find it impossible to ignore what happens on the football field.

Manchester United's 2-0 win over Arsenal - a game which incidentally attracted Sky's second biggest audience for a Premiership match - might not have been a feast of football. But it was certainly a dish of drama.

Every newspaper front page and every TV news bulletin was dominated by what had or hadn't happened at Old Trafford. And, at the office or in the pub, it's a fair bet that you added your fourpenneth to the debate.

Football has embedded itself into English culture to the point where it would be impossible to ignore it even if you wanted to and, with the greatest of respect to fans following teams outside the top-flight, the Premiership is the vehicle driving our national obsession.

It remains as uplifting, as unpredictable and as utterly captivating as ever.

Tomorrow I will be at St James' Park to watch Newcastle take on Fulham. I don't know what's going to happen any more than you do, but I know something - I can't wait to find out.