Ange Postecoglou has been criticised for presenting the same answer no matter what question was posed of him. For much of this encounter against Liverpool, hopeless Tottenham did not even do that. They were just bad.
Until the result was already beyond any reasonable doubt, there was not even a sponge cake on offer from Postecoglou’s side here – just an empty plate. While their inappropriately gung-ho approach has been vexatious to fans and enormously fun for the rest of us, to be left without even that for so much of the game was far, far worse.
That Liverpool would control the run of play was to be expected, and defensively, Spurs at least have the excuse of playing almost a completely makeshift goalkeeper-and-back-four combo. But it was genuinely shocking how poorly they did regardless. Conceding six goals at home to a divisional rival should set alarm bells ringing anywhere, regardless of the quality of the opposition.
Even more surprising just how little Tottenham’s full complement of midfield and attacking personnel offered in return, Dejan Kulusevski excepted. The only surprising part of the scoreboard on the final whistle was the ‘3’ on Tottenham’s side, not the ‘6’ on Liverpool’s.
Tottenham’s narrow 4-3-3 seemed to scream at Liverpool’s wide men: “cross all you like, we’ll defend the width of the box”. The wisdom of that is extremely questionable when facing Trent Alexander-Arnold and Mohamed Salah in the first place – we hear they’re both quite dangerous from wide areas – but Liverpool gladly accepted their end of that offer; Spurs failed to live up to theirs.
Alexander-Arnold was in excellent form, and his cross for Luis Diaz from acres of space deep on the Liverpool right was inch-perfect, but the Colombian was completely unchallenged as he contorted his body to guide the ball into the far corner.
Liverpool’s second featured a similar build-up: Cody Gakpo found himself blocked off on the left, so simply tapped it back to Andy Robertson to cross instead. Dominik Szoboszlai could only head it straight up in the air, but Alexis Mac Allister was there to run under it and nod into the top corner.
The visitors had had an answer to every bit of what little Spurs did to test them for 41 minutes, but 30 seconds of inattention allowed Tottenham their first two shots on target.
Pape Matar Sarr shot straight at Alisson after Spurs countered off Szoboszlai’s heavy touch, but James Maddison was sufficiently more accurate to find the bottom corner after Kulusevski forced a loose ball out of Mac Allister just outside the Liverpool box. Virgil van Dijk bizarrely seeming to move out of the path to goal and Alisson beaten when it looked as though a better reaction would have made for a straightforward save.
That was as generous as Liverpool got, though, and they restored their two-goal advantage in added time in distressingly straightforward fashion: a lump of a long ball from Alexander-Arnold, flicked on by Szoboszlai for Salah, who slipped it back to the Hungarian as he charged into the box before firing through Fraser Forster’s legs.
Tottenham may have looked slightly more threatening after the break, but – in typical Tottenham fashion – of making them more porous than ever. Salah’s two tap-ins both came at the end of much too simple counter-attacks where Spurs found themselves completely outnumbered.
Szoboszlai and Diaz should each have matched Salah’s brace before Tottenham’s belated fightback, but the former fired wide after a long, straight ball from Alisson sent him clean through to round Forster, while Diaz lobbed onto the roof of the net after Salah had again given the poor Tottenham keeper a one-on-one to deal with.
Somehow, though, Tottenham found a way to make the scoreline extremely Ange-y as Liverpool gave every impression of assuming their job was complete. Kulusevski finished well after a blocked ball into the box fell nicely for him to fire past Alisson, and Dominic Solanke got free of van Dijk to slide home Brennan Johnson’s looping header back across the box.
Sufficiently roused by the prospect of having to defend a two-goal lead for another seven minutes plus stoppages, Liverpool confirmed the prior sense that they could score almost at their own will by restoring their three-goal cushion just three minutes later courtesy of Diaz, who this time made no mistake as he found the bottom corner off another Salah through ball.
For Tottenham to be the top scorers in the Premier League and yet to 11th at Christmas is just the most wonderful nonsense…but it does not speak at all highly of Postecoglou’s ability to rise to the kind of challenge expected of him.
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