Tottenham are 11th in the Premier League table at Christmas, having been well beaten by Liverpool in N17 on Sunday afternoon. The 6-3 scoreline at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium tells the story of a crazy festive fixture, but against an injury-ravaged Spurs, the league leaders could have had even more.
Liverpool raced into a 2-0 lead and while James Maddison gave Spurs hope with a response, a goal just before half-time gave the Reds their two-goal cushion once more.
And if you thought Spurs would improve after the break you were mistaken, at least straight after the interval anyway, with Liverpool adding to further goals to make it 5-1 with half an hour to play.
Tottenham briefly made a comeback with goals from Dejan Kulusevski and Dominic Solanke, but after Brennan Johnson missed a good chance to make it 5-4 and really scare the leaders, Luis Diaz scored his second of the game to put all hope of a comeback out of sight at 6-3. It could have been more for the Reds, really, but Spurs and their young team battled bravely on in the name of their head coach Ange Postecoglou and his attacking philosophy.
Here we take a look at how the national media responded to the epic clash...
The Telegraph
Are you not entertained? With a grin, Ange Postecoglou borrowed the famous line from the movie Gladiator following the thrilling midweek win over Manchester United.
But it is one thing putting a team with United’s many evident problems and shortcomings to the sword in the Carabao Cup and another going into the arena nose-to-nose up against would-be title winners.
There must be sympathy for Ange Postecoglou, especially given how bravely he continues to demand his team play, but it does lead to criticism of its own. They give up simple goals at times and so it proved.
The Guardian
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.
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.
Daily Mail
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.
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.