MOURINHO CAN’T SPANNER IN REDS’

SIX years ago, Liverpool were closing in on a league title when they ran into Jose Mourinho. The Portuguese was the manager of Chelsea then and he aproached his role as the saboteur of Liverpool’s dreams with the relish of a sadist.

It was a masterclass in ruination. Steven Gerrard may have slipped, but it was Mourinho who did the damage.

Liverpool came up against him again last night, now the manager of Tottenham. The Reds are going for the title again. Their drought stretches to almost 30 years and their desperation to end it is driving them on with the kind of fervour that English football has not witnessed before. This time, as the rest of the Premier League kneels before them, not even Mourinho could derail them.

Oh he tried. And he could be proud of Spurs’ performance. And he could be proud of the fact that, without Harry Kane and other first-team players, Spurs caused Jurgen Klopp’s team a mighty amount of discomfort in the last 20 minutes of this match.

But for all Spurs’ effort, they could not quite find the chink in the armour that the forlorn chasing pack yearns for someone to find.

‘We were very, very close,’ said Mourinho. I think we have many reasons to be sad with the result but I have only reasons to be happy with what the boys did.

‘I think we deserved more from this game. We intensified the pressure a bit more in the second half. We had lots of good chances.

‘I’m proud of the boys, it was fantastic to compete against such a good team.’

Liverpool have not lost in the league for more than a calendar year. Their unbeaten league run now stretches to 38 games the equivalent of an entire season.

This term, they have played 21 games and won 20 of them. They are 16 points clear at the top. If they continue on this course, they will amass 110 points, smashing the English record set by Guardiola’s Manchester City two years ago.

Liverpool are a machine, crushing all before them as they roll on towards a title that is already almost within their grasp.

Klopp said afterwards: ‘The result is the most important thing. There was one team who deserved to win and that was us. That the game was not decided after 50 or 60 minutes was our fault.

‘Of course then it was hectic, very intense. It’s difficult to come here. You can expect that they defend deep. They are really good at counter-attacking.

‘It’s not that I think we can’t do better, the opposite in fact. But if it was easy to win here many more teams would do it. We should have scored more goals, that’s the truth.’

To watch Liverpool against Spurs was to see a beautiful blur of brilliant red hurtling up and down the pitch, made even more luminous by the Saturday night lights of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

We talk about them in abstract, about how good they are, about their statistics. But it is only when you seem them up close that you remember how relentless they are, how merciless they are, how commanding they are, how welldrilled they are, how brilliant they are, how fiercely they fight to regain possession, how swiftly they counter-attack.

Mourinho handed a league debut to young English defender Japhet Tanganga and he repaid his faith inside the first two minutes. Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain lofted a clever