Let's start with a flaw. Liverpool's defense is still the best in the Premier League, having allowed 13 goals in 15 matches entering Sunday's trip to North London for a match against often-feisty but currently-shambolic Tottenham Hotspur. Virgil van Dijk is back to world-beating form, and his various partners in the center—often Ibrahima Konaté, though not for the past two months, thanks to a knee injury—have been competent enough to lead the league in goals against. However, there have been some cracks showing, and Liverpool's two previous league matches saw that dominant defense give up five combined goals to Newcastle and Fulham.
Both of those matches ended in draws, only the third and fourth blemishes in Liverpool's league season so far, and though it is unfair to put the entirety of the blame on the defense, it certainly didn't help. And so, if one were to look at just how many goals Liverpool gave up on Sunday against Tottenham, it would read like another bad day at the office for van Dijk and co. Thankfully, soccer is played in both directions, and Tottenham's three goals on its home ground only felt like feeble attempts at holding off the siege that was Liverpool's high-line-abusing attack, which scored six goals but probably could have scored 10.
I'd be comfortable saying that the first half of Sunday's match was the most impressive 45 minutes that Liverpool has put together all season, even though it allowed James Maddison to break the shutout in the 41st minute. Otherwise, Liverpool felt as if it were playing a different sport to Tottenham, or at least on a higher plane of existence. Spurs manager Ange Postecoglou loves a good high back-line, meant to pressure teams in their own half and force turnovers that Tottenham's deadly attack can capitalize on (and this is what happened for Maddison's goal, to be fair), but Liverpool might not be the team to deploy that strategy against.
That's because Liverpool has van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold, both defenders capable of hitting gorgeous long balls to the attacking front-line, a strategy that is perfectly built to counter opponents' high lines. Liverpool kept launching long balls and forcing Tottenham's makeshift back-line to keep up. Given that I already spoiled the final score of 6-3, it's rather obvious that the Spurs back-line of Pedro Porro, Radu Dragusin, Archie Gray, and Djed Spence were not up to the challenge.
There's little point in going through every Liverpool goal in hopes of relaying the flow of the match. There was no real flow, because "flow" implies a smooth pull and counter-pull. Instead, this was a tsunami wave smashing through Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, as Liverpool brushed off any Spurs comeback attempts with simply more goals. For example: Following the opening one-two header punch from the decidedly short and not header-inclined duo of Luis Díaz and Alexis Mac Allister gave Liverpool a 2-0 lead, Maddison scored his goal to give the hosts some hope. That hope lasted about five minutes before Dominik Szoboszlai got the lead back up to two with a cool finish after a delicious counter that took the ball from goalkeeper Alisson's feet to the back of the net in six passes and just 15 seconds:
It wouldn't ever be closer than it was in the five minutes after Maddison's goal. You might have noticed a lack of Mohamed Salah in the paragraphs above, and in the first half in general, but the Egyptian—who is on form that if it's not the best of his career, it is the most exhilarating—showed up on the pitch and in the score sheet twice in seven minutes. In the 54th, he got on the end of a scramble in the box following yet another incisive Liverpool counter-attack, while in the 61st, he scored his 15th league goal of the season following an unbelievable touch and assist from Szoboszlai that left Salah with yet another free goal in front of him:
Even with those two goals, though, Salah wasn't really the main man for Liverpool on Sunday, and that's the scariest part of this win for the rest of the league. Though one could argue that Díaz was the man of the match, given that he scored both the opener and the dagger in the 85th minute, after Tottenham had scored two goals in 11 minutes to get it back to 5-3, this was as complete a performance as any team has put on in the Premier League this season. No one player stood out, because all 11 played great.
While Tottenham is struggling, and hard, following its marquee win over Manchester City in November, it is still capable of beating anyone, and for Liverpool to go on the road and unleash this kind of attacking hell is impressive enough to be noteworthy in a season where everything Liverpool has done has worked out. Under new manager Arne Slot, Liverpool hasn't evolved or changed radically, but rather it has been recharged after an exhausting end to the very successful Jürgen Klopp era.
In that time, it felt like every match was life-or-death, because Klopp often treated each match that way. Slot, on the other hand, has given Liverpool freer reign to just be what it is meant to be, and what it can be: a wrecking ball of whirling aggression, one that can strike at any point through almost every player on the field, and one that can put up six goals against a top flight team while still feeling disappointed that it left goals on the table. How does a team stop Liverpool when it can't even figure out who is the dangerous player at any given moment? That's the question that the rest of the potential title challengers will have to hope someone figures out, and given how their performances have gone recently, it's hard to say whether it'll be enough to slow Liverpool down.
It's still too early to make any grand proclamations about the Premier League title race, even with Manchester City's continued swoon and Chelsea getting put into the Sean Dyche Torture Chamber this past weekend. Arsenal losing Bukayo Saka for an extended period of time also would seem to tilt an already favorable season even further into Liverpool's lap, but it's only December and Liverpool has often started strong in recent years before fading away in the spring. However, I do feel comfortable enough to say that this feels different, because Liverpool doesn't feel like it's straining for its dominance. Instead, the Pool Boys are taking what opponents give them and, when opponents give them very little, they are creating whatever they need to. If this current defensive wobble is temporary, and if the attack keeps working as it has been with Salah at the helm but not always in need of active steering, then it's hard to see how the Liverpool that showed up to North London on Sunday won't be lifting the Premier League trophy come May.
