- Tottenham entertained Liverpool in the Premier League on Sunday afternoon
- The Reds put in a stunning attacking display as they won a chaotic game 6-3
- LISTEN NOW: It’s All Kicking Off! Are Tottenham managers treated differently to other managers?
Liverpool are the team to beat while Tottenham are – for the time being at least – the team that anybody could hope to beat.
Arne Slot’s Liverpool head into Christmas top of the Premier League and rightly so. They were magnificent here. Hungry, clinical and overflowing with festive fervour. What a sight they were with the ball.
Tottenham, meanwhile, are down on numbers and belief. They were waiting to be taken apart by a good team here and that’s exactly what happened. Don’t be fooled by the scoreline. Tottenham were 5-1 down with half an hour left and at that stage the smart money would have been on seven or eight for the visiting team.
It must have been a desperate day for someone like 18-year-old Archie Gray. A teenage midfielder who can play at full-back but is currently being asked to play centre half behind a midfield that leaks like an old leather show when the opposition have possession.
By the time the likes of Mo Salah and Luis Diaz had finished with him here, it’s a miracle he could breathe never mind find his way off the field. Gray is a good player and he will learn and grow. But if he is still waking up dizzy on Christmas day then he will know who to blame.
This stadium has now witnessed 23 goals in its last three games and this was an afternoon that finished in a rather strange way, as two Tottenham goals out of nothing brought them back to 5-3. Some of the fans who had left after Liverpool’s fifth must have been clamouring to get back in as a strange kind of hope filled the air.
But reality tends to bite when teams like Liverpool are around and it did so here. It’s credit to Tottenham that they kept going. Fair play to those supporters who stayed when the pubs of the Seven Sisters Road must have felt like a reasonable alternative.
They will know what it is they witnessed on the whole, though. They will know what this was. It was a hiding. A thrashing. Men against boys and confused and disorientated boys at that.
Liverpool will push on towards the New Year knowing how good they are, driven on by the knowledge that Manchester City are gone from the race.
Tottenham must hope to get some bodies back and quickly. Their run of league games goes Nottingham Forest, Wolves, Newcastle, Arsenal. Not easy. It rarely is. And they are already in the bottom half of the table.
Before the game, the team selections seemed portentous. Slot was able to make changes to his team after their midweek win at Southampton. Tottenham manager Ange Postecoglou, meanwhile, didn’t feel he could make a single one from the side that came through against Manchester United in the Carabao Cup on Thursday. In truth, it showed almost from the first moment.
Fraser Forster, no doubt traumatised after two horror moments against United, passed the ball straight to Salah in the third minute and somehow got away with it. He then saved from the same player soon after and also from Diaz.
Then Salah beat three players and thrashed a shot against the bar. The red threat was coming from everywhere and Spurs – far too easy to play through – didn’t have a hope apart from to hope.
The damn broke in the 23rd minute. Trent Alexander-Arnold crossed from the right and Diaz timed his run perfectly off the back of Radu Dragusin to stoop and head low into the corner.
It was a super goal and soon after, when Diaz had a low effort saved by Forster, Liverpool were averaging a shot every two-and-half minutes. Not bad for an away team.
The next one they registered – a header – went in. This time the cross was from Andy Robertson. Dominik Szoboszlai challenged two Spurs defenders when we may have expected Forster to come out, and when the ball looped up Alexis MacAllister he headed it in from close range.
On the side line Postecoglou looked a little haunted. His team didn’t look like responding. They looked tired and edgy. But then they scored.
MacAllister had time to control the ball 30 yards from his own goal but his touch was heavy and when Dejan Kulusevski robbed him, James Maddison picked up the pieces to curl a good goal low to Alisson’s left.
Could this goal out of nowhere change the game? We wondered but then Salah read Szoboszlai’s header from a hacked Alexander-Arnold clearance earlier than anyone and ran clear to feed the Hungarian with a reverse ball. Szoboszlai, excellent all game, beat Forster comfortably to effectively seal the game before it was even at the midway point.
Tottenham, booed off by a minority at the interval, had to score next and they didn’t. Robertson won the ball just outside his own area in the 54th minute to enable Liverpool to go the length of the field through Diaz and Cody Gakpo. When Gakpo pulled the ball back from the byline, Spurs had two half chances to clear but couldn’t and Salah picked up the pieces to score.
Spurs were now in mortal danger of embarrassment and knew it. Three minutes later Szoboszlai was able to run clear on to a straight forward Alisson punt and when he rounded Forster only the side netting prevented him scoring Liverpool’s fifth. Then, ten seconds beyond the hour, Liverpool did score again as they cut through Postecoglou’s team down the left and converted another goal with ease as Szoboszlai cut the ball back to Salah.
The Egyptian now has one more Liverpool goal than the great Billy Liddell with 229 and sits fourth on the all-time list. This was a team performance though. It had stand out performances scattered all over it.
That Spurs then scored twice – in the 73rd and 83rd minutes – was something nobody saw coming. Only here, only at Tottenham. Dominic Solanke set up the first one – lofting a neat pass through to Kulusevski – and then scored the second on the stretch after Brennan Johnson out jumped Alexander-Arnold to head down a deep cross.
Any kind of real comeback would have been preposterous, the story of the season. It didn’t happen. Liverpool broke down the right and Diaz scored low on the overlap.
In the away end they sang Christmas carols. Everywhere else they just shrugged. This is Tottenham. Tottenham with mitigating circumstances but Tottenham all the same. For Postecoglou, the mission to crack the code goes on. Slot, meanwhile, is still awaiting his first proper bump in the road.
