Liverpool are serious about this. They’re not in London for souvenirs or sightseeing. They had a game four days earlier, they’ve got another in four days’ time, and so all they really want for Christmas is to get in, get the points and get out. They’d rather do it clean. But they’ll do it dirty if they have to.
Above all, they know exactly what they want. Luis Díaz wants to spin off his man and run from deep, and Ryan Gravenberch wants to plug the gaps and get the ball moving, Dominik Szoboszlai wants you to commit, but not until he’s put you half a step off balance first, and Mo Salah wants to be Mo Salah. They can go short or long, hit you from every angle, hurt you from every bit of the pitch. Nine Liverpool players made a key pass in this game, including the goalkeeper and both full-backs.
Tottenham are not serious about this. They win spectacularly, and then they lose spectacularly, and it doesn’t really matter because over the past couple of years they have engendered a culture in which progress is basically divorced from outcomes. League positions are of no consequence. Champions League qualification is not a target, because the entire success of this multibillion-pound operation is geared around whether a middle-aged Australian man feels his ideas have taken root this week or not.
There are clear and tangible advantages to this approach. Most importantly, it’s a lot of fun. This is expressive football with no compromises, a young and essential energy, and occasionally the ultimate rush. When it destroys the quadruple champions or puts seven past Manchester United in two games, it feels like total vindication, and who doesn’t love one of those? This is the entertainment business, there are Tunnel Club packages to be sold, and being the Premier League’s top scorers is a pretty persuasive pitch if you’re not really fussed about who wins.
But there are also disadvantages to being an unserious team, and perhaps you glimpse them most sharply when you come up against a serious team. A team that don’t take a weird solace in denying their rivals the league, or entertain bizarre superstitions about maybe winning the FA Cup when the year ends in a one. A coach who believes his job is to make his players look good, rather than the other way around.
Let’s take, by way of illustration, the last five minutes of the first half. James Maddison’s goal against the run of play has just threatened to transform the complexion of the game. Liverpool only lead 2-1 despite subjecting Fraser Forster to a 40-minute HIIT workout. They wanted this clean. Now, if they can only get to half-time and regroup, a tiring Tottenham have the chance to make things dirty.
At this point, the ball rolls towards Trent Alexander-Arnold in the right-back position. Obviously Djed Spence doesn’t know that three passes later the ball will be in the Tottenham net, otherwise he probably wouldn’t have sprinted 50 yards up the left wing in a futile attempt to press him. Obviously Radu Dragusin – who here looked more like a boy band member playing centre-half in a Soccer Aid game – thinks he’s going to win the low-percentage header against Szoboszlai. Otherwise he wouldn’t charge towards the ball and leave a huge space behind him for Salah to attack.
The real question is: why do they think these things? How have Tottenham been so unlucky as to end up with so many international footballers who seem to make terrible decisions at key moments? Are they just bad players, incapable of reading a situation? Or have they been slowly stewed in a culture where total commitment is an acceptable substitute for judgment? Where the acid test of your quality is not what you did, or what actually happened, but how loyally you stuck to the ideology?
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The last 20 minutes, as Tottenham fought their way back from 5-1 to 5-3, felt the most instructive of all. Spurs kept trying to raid the Liverpool area. Liverpool kept clearing it, except when you’re playing Spurs every clearance is also a through ball. And amid the carnage of the second half, there was also an immense and ominous coolness to them, the unerring ability to execute under pressure the thing that is required, and to keep doing it over and over. This is the difference between a serious and an unserious team.
And there is nothing inevitable about this. Tottenham and Liverpool may feel gulfs apart, but in reality they are the eighth- and seventh-richest clubs in the world, fishing in the same water. Tottenham could have had Arne Slot in 2023. Tottenham could have had Díaz in 2022. Tottenham could have assembled a proper backroom structure years ago, instead of leaving their fate in the hands of a spiralling succession of celebrity managers.
But none of this happened, and so what we get instead is salesmanship, the same pot of stasis relaunched in new, more addictive flavours. It’s all going to click soon. At least they didn’t do Arsenal a favour. Ange always wins a trophy in his second season. Europa League, you never know. If you don’t rate his methods, you’re probably racist against Australians. Mikey Moore is going to be one hell of a player. And best of all: only six more years until the year ends in a one again.
