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.

It must have been a desperate day for someone like 18-year-old Archie Gray. A teenage midfielder who can play at full-back but is currently being asked to play centre half behind a midfield that leaks like an old leather show when the opposition have possession.

By the time the likes of Mo Salah and Luis Diaz had finished with him here, it’s a miracle he could breathe never mind find his way off the field. Gray is a good player and he will learn and grow. But if he is still waking up dizzy on Christmas day then he will know who to blame.

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.

 

Liverpool thrashed Tottenham 6-3 to go four points clear at the top of the Premier League

 

Mohamed Salah scored twice as Liverpool repeatedly cut through Tottenham’s defence

It was a brutal 90 minutes for Ange Postecoglou as the pressure was heaped on the Australian

 

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.

Liverpool will push on towards the New Year knowing how good they are, driven on by the knowledge that Manchester City are gone from the race.

Tottenham must hope to get some bodies back and quickly. Their run of league games goes Nottingham Forest, Wolves, Newcastle, Arsenal. Not easy. It rarely is. And they are already in the bottom half of the table.

Before the game, the team selections seemed portentous. Slot was able to make changes to his team after their midweek win at Southampton. Tottenham manager Ange Postecoglou, meanwhile, didn’t feel he could make a single one from the side that came through against Manchester United in the Carabao Cup on Thursday. In truth, it showed almost from the first moment.

Fraser Forster, no doubt traumatised after two horror moments against United, passed the ball straight to Salah in the third minute and somehow got away with it. He then saved from the same player soon after and also from Diaz.

Then Salah beat three players and thrashed a shot against the bar. The red threat was coming from everywhere and Spurs – far too easy to play through – didn’t have a hope apart from to hope.

The damn broke in the 23rd minute. Trent Alexander-Arnold crossed from the right and Diaz timed his run perfectly off the back of Radu Dragusin to stoop and head low into the corner.

 

Salah’s brace saw him become Liverpool’s fourth highest goalscorer in the club’s history

Luis Diaz had put the Reds ahead with a diving header from Trent Alexander-Arnold’s cross

Alexis Mac Allister made it two as he nodded home past Fraser Forster from just yards out

James Maddison pulled one back yet in truth this game was a brutal one for Tottenham

Dominik Szoboszlai got in on the act moments later as Arne Slot’s side purred throughout

Salah’s first goal saw him tap home from yards out following a goalmouth scramble

He slotted his second after Szoboszlai’s unselfish cut back when bearing down on goal

Yet Diaz then added the gloss on the remarkable game as his strike ensured the Reds won 6-3

Spurs sit 11th in the Premier League after the weekend’s action, eight points off the top four