In a shock twist, Liverpool have won the Premier League title and Tottenham are absolute cack. Watch as we spin those two earth-shattering pieces of brand new information into 16 entire conclusions.
1. For the second time since football was officially invented but the 20th overall, Liverpool are champions of England. And for the first time since 1990 they could celebrate it in a packed-out Anfield in front of their own fans.
It may not have carried the same weight of history as their 2020 success, but it really does look like everyone involved enjoyed today rather more at a packed-out Anfield full of fans and flares.
They have been compellingly and beguilingly the best team in the country this season, propelled by the brilliance of the man who is both their best player and the league’s, under a manager who has become the fifth to come in and win the Premier League title in his first season in charge, and done so almost exclusively with the team Jurgen Klopp left him. The comparisons with the fate of the only other team to reach 20 English league titles after the loss of their last great manager are inevitable.
2. We don’t want this to become too much of a season-long analysis – if you want some full-year reasons for why and how Liverpool have demolished the competition this year then go here – but it was hard to escape the idea that this was a game that came with plenty of familiar elements that fairly neatly wrap up the story of the season as a whole.
As a microcosm of Liverpool’s year, this game against a powerfully stupid and entirely overwhelmed Spurs had an awful lot about it that could apply more widely. The undeniable and alarming regression of Big Six rivals. The devastating Liverpool response to any unexpected setback. The defensive resilience of Virgil van Dijk when things briefly threatened to get awkward. The utter magnificence of that midfield trio.
And then above all else, the star of the show, Mohamed Salah.
3. There was, very obviously, zero peril. Even had Liverpool and Tottenham combined to perform a wildly improbable madness and contrive an away win today it would have been quite funny, sure, but still only served to very briefly delay the inevitable. And in truth Liverpool avoiding defeat here, all that was required after Arsenal’s latest slip in midweek, already felt really quite inevitable.
Liverpool could not have asked for more perfect opposition for this fixture than this particular iteration of Spurs at this particular time. Even some very good Spurs sides have generally gone to Anfield and left with very little to show for it – they haven’t won here since 2011 – but this is neither a very good nor at this point particularly invested Spurs side.
4. Such is the overall state of the season that the party atmosphere that began long before kick-off here would always have been in full swing, but had Liverpool been up against, say, any of the Premier League’s upwardly mobile ‘middle class’ – your Brightons or your Fulhams or the Bournemouths of this world – there would at the very least have been the nagging voice at the back of the head going ‘Hope we don’t f*ck this now’.
Even when Dominic Solanke headed Spurs into an early lead, nobody had any real doubt about the eventual direction the afternoon would take. Not Liverpool and, just as importantly, not Tottenham.
In hindsight, Spurs having precisely five minutes of vaguely disruptive banter in them – no more, no less – was probably the likeliest outcome of all here.
5. But the sense of inevitability about Liverpool’s response to that early setback wasn’t entirely because of Spursy McSpursface. Liverpool have done this time and again this season against teams far more competent and coherent.
They have won more points from losing positions this season than anyone, while only Southampton have lost more matches from winning positions than Spurs. This was simply two teams showing us who they are, and frankly we all already had a pretty clear idea.
6. Liverpool’s equaliser proves somebody somewhere has a sense of humour at least as a Luis Diaz goal against Spurs wrongly initially disallowed for offside was on this occasion correctly sorted out by a good VAR process.
Another near identical goal – this time, though, actually and correctly ruled out for offside – followed soon after. Barely 15 minutes into the game, Liverpool’s midfield had assumed an almost comical level of dominance of the areas both in front of and behind Spurs’ defence, and it was a domination that would never let up.
7. It’s easy to pick out the fourth goal as the most obviously reflective of this season, consisting as it did of Mo Salah cutting in from the right beyond a left-back reduced to the status of a traffic cone who knows deep in his bones both a) exactly what Salah is going to try and do and more chillingly b) that he is utterly powerless to prevent it. The ball arrowed into the bottom corner with the inevitability that was all-pervading around Anfield this afternoon.
But really the most satisfying goal to highlight this specific Liverpool side was the second. There was some standard unnecessary fannying about from Spurs, but ignore that for now and concentrate one what Liverpool did, and who did it. Dominik Szoboszlai pressured Spurs into their initial mistake. Ryan Gravenberch won the resulting loose ball and set up Alexis Mac Allister to rifle Liverpool into the lead.
It was a wonderful goal and the one that will perhaps have made Arne Slot most proud. Of course his success this season required and received buy-in from the likes of Alisson and Virgil van Dijk and Salah, but getting elite performances out of that trio is still somewhere close to the telling Daryl Strawberry to hit a home run level of management.
What Slot has done with Liverpool’s midfield is far more significant, and by far his most impressive achievement in moulding the excellent raw materials he was left by Klopp into a title-winning machine.
8. The third goal, scored by Cody Gakpo, came after more Spurs defensive nonsense. The story today was very obviously and correctly Liverpool’s, yet watching events unfold we still found ourselves most struck by the fact that somehow even after this there are five teams who have conceded more Premier League goals this season than Tottenham.
Genuinely… how? We can just about get our heads around Southampton having managed it given the way they decided to try and play for the first half of the season. But what about Leicester? Sure, they’ve not been any good but how on earth have they managed to be a full 20 goals conceded worse than this Spurs team?
This was not an atypical Spurs defensive performance. It’s just that for whatever reason it really is only Liverpool who have taken full advantage of it both home and away this season with 11 goals scored.
Again, impossible to resist the ‘season-in-microcosm’ narratives here: it looked easy against opposition seemingly unable and unwilling to put up any kind of fight, but only Liverpool actually managed to do it.
9. By the time the second half kicked off, Liverpool now attacking a Kop in full-throated, damp-eyed celebratory mood, it was clear that the match itself was, as the Premier League season has been for so very long, over as a contest.
Rubbing salt into some gaping North London wounds – not just the white half of it either, of course – Liverpool’s players joined in the fun by openly and unapologetically going off trying to complete side-quests.
The main one was ‘Get Salah A Goal’. The season and the day demanded it, and Liverpool’s players understood the assignment. It was already clear what the new main objective for the second half was with the overall task so obviously in hand, but Gakpo might have displayed a touch more guile about it when, presented with a clear one-on-one unmarked shooting chance he instead opted to try and square the ball to a very much marked Salah.
10. Again, though: only delaying the inevitable. What was somehow his first Premier League goal in 50 days arrived. And he would have had another just six minutes later had Destiny Udogie not stopped him by simply controlling the ball into his own net instead.
Udogie is not the first left-back to be terrorised by Salah in this fashion and will not be the last. But few can have had a worse seven-minute spell against the great man than he contrived here.
11. On a day that delivered so much inevitability, there was, though, one thing missing. Richarlison’s traditional late goal in an Anfield defeat after his introduction as a second-half substitute. We had never been more sure of anything at all than we were about him making it 5-2 and puffing his chest out in defiant celebration. Just goes to show that even on the most apparently predictable of days, this great game can still surprise us.
There are still limits to that surprise, though. Richarlison hadn’t totally lost his way. He did get booked for entirely pointlessly picking a fight with Harvey Elliott deep into injury-time for absolutely no apparent reason other than giving a giddy Anfield crowd the chance for some good old pantomime booing.
12. But what of Spurs? Even allowing for all manner of mitigation about the hiding to nothing on which they found themselves, the fact that they have a far more important game on Thursday night and their selection made that crystal clear, and the fact Liverpool are quite simply much better than they are, this was atrocious.
Were this any kind of one-off isolated incident then ‘Europa League semi-final on Thursday night’ would provide all the excuse necessary, never mind partial forgiveness. But it isn’t, so it cannot.
Ask yourself this question: do you think today would have gone markedly differently had Ange Postecoglou picked his strongest side? There’s the rub, and there’s the Australian’s biggest problem, and there is the reason why even winning the Europa League surely cannot now save him.
Because it wouldn’t, would it? Spurs’ injury crisis has long since ended, and there has been no improvement to either results or performances.
13. And that really is why Postecoglou has no viable future evenat the club if he does, against all logic, deliver that promised and dizzyingly plausible trophy. Because it doesn’t matter what team he puts out, it doesn’t matter which players he entrusts on any given day, the whole thing just doesn’t work. And the sample size for that is now over 60 games – long before Spurs downed Premier League tools to focus on a Europa League smash-and-grab.
Even allowing for the fact the Premier League has not really been any kind of priority for Spurs since their last really good performance in it – a 4-1 win at Ipswich that effectively guaranteed there would be no undignified scramble to avoid relegation – it remains uncomfortable to watch just how woefully off it they have been recently.
They now have four points from their last eight Premier League games; a wildly undeserved 2-2 draw against Bournemouth, and a home win against Southampton.
It would be no surprise to see that run extend to four points from 12 games by the end of the season. Somehow, we find ourselves in a situation where it is now easier to conceive of Postecoglou’s Spurs winning the Europa League than it is to picture them winning a single Premier League game.
14. We have even now arguably reached a point where the vast gulf in Spurs’ domestic and European performances is damning of both players and manager in itself. Because Spurs’ last three performances in the Europa League – the home leg turnaround against AZ and both legs against Eintracht Frankfurt – have not just been better than anything they have produced in the league, but entirely unrecognisable in both style and commitment.
There are a great many of very senior players at Spurs who are no longer playing for the manager, who no longer care about Spurs, but who are still producing something close to the levels of which we know they are capable when those European nights come around. And those players know who they are.
There is very obviously nobody in the Europa League as good as Liverpool. But there aren’t 15 teams in the Premier League better than Eintracht Frankfurt either.
15. Another low-key Spursy element to the day. While everyone is at the mercy of the fixture computer on these occasions, this is now the third time in Premier League history that a champion team has secured the required points to seal the title against Spurs, following Manchester United in 1999 and Arsenal five years later.
Of course that is more times than any other Premier League club – Man United, Wigan, West Ham and Aston Villa having all been two-time title party guests. And it doesn’t even take into account the infamous Battle of Stamford Bridge in 2016 that handed Leicester the title.
16. But of course the final word today has to go to Liverpool and to Salah. So thank you, Mo, for the absolute cast-iron 24-carat headline gold of saying winning the title without Jurgen Klopp was 100 per cent better. We know exactly what you mean; he was definitely holding you all back.
