Liverpool’s winning machine leaves Mourinho on knees
Jose Mourinho dropped to his knees in despair, stood up and mimed a friendly punch into the stomach of the fourth official, having seen his Tottenham Hotspur team come close – but by no means close enough to taking one point from the Premier League’s runaway leaders.
It was a miss from substitute Giovani Lo Celso that prompted Mourinho to do so, and perhaps the smile on his face was because he knew that his team had at least given Liverpool a game, although that was all. This remarkable winning machine rolls on and the records fall: no club in Europe’s top five leagues have ever before taken the 61 points from their first 21 games that Liverpool now have. This was their 38th league game undefeated to give them a 16-point lead at the top of the table before Manchester City have a chance to trim it today.
This time it was Roberto Firmino who was the match-winner, and although Spurs came back into this game after the interval – by then behind – the difference between last June’s Champions League finalists was obvious.
Riven by injures, Spurs were built around a Mourinho plan to contain Liverpool and then try to up the pace in the last 20 minutes. They did do that but the chances that fell to Son Heungmin and Lo Celso were not taken.
From his hospital bed, Harry Kane tweeted a picture of himself post-surgery giving a thumbs-up. Later Mourinho would exhort everyone not to dwell too long on those who were missing, before reeling off the names nonetheless: Hugo Lloris, Moussa Sissoko, Ben Davies and, of course, Kane himself. “I don’t want to speak about him,” Mourinho said after wondering aloud if Kane would have taken Spurs’ secondhalf chances. “He’s irreplaceable. The boys were fantastic in the way they tried and gave everything.”
The boys did, indeed, give everything, but when the moment came to convert their resurgence into something more meaningful, they failed. Mourinho suggested that a lunge by Andy Robertson in the second half, which ended with him slamming a boot into the leg of Premier League debutant Japhet Tanganga, should have earned a red card from the video assistant referee. “They [VAR] were having tea, and didn’t watch Robertson,” Mourinho said.
There were more complaints about the throw-in that led to Liverpool’s goal that he said should have been in Spurs’ favour, but rather than invest himself fully in a VAR backlash, Mourinho took his fourth game without a win in all competitions and sought to present it as a positive. He built up Tanganga, who had played just once before for the first team in the League Cup in September, and again said that the players at his disposal were not yet ready to play the way he wanted them to.
“Liverpool have worked with this coach for five years and the players are totally adapted physically to the football he wanted to play – this is a very important thing,” Mourinho said. “If we tried to play the way we did in the last 20 minutes from the beginning, we would collapse. They are not used to this style and they are not adapted. On top of that, we don’t have many solutions [available players].”
Even so, his team have now conceded 20 goals in the 13 matches that Mourinho has been in charge and there are problems with Christian Eriksen again, asked to play in centre midfield of a 4-4-1-1 formation. The Dane was subject to some booing from his own fans when he came off in the second half as Mourinho deployed Lo Celso and Erik Lamela to try to rescue a point.
“We had to play for it and then we had to fight for it,” Jurgen Klopp said. The Liverpool manager added that when he approached Firmino after the game: “Bobby said to me, ‘I know what you’re going to say. I should have scored more goals.’ That was absolutely not what I wanted to say.”
Tanganga, 20, had blocked a goalbound shot from Firmino in the second minute of the game and Liverpool finished with seven attempts on target, but only one goal. They were not overrun at the end but they did find themselves stretched by Spurs.
Klopp said that he had forgotten Liverpool were on the brink of the major European leagues points record. “I have been in football 50 years. If someone had said to me whether it was possible, I would have said, ‘No’. But now I don’t feel anything. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but it’s really cool.” As ever, it is eyes forward for Liverpool, who play at home next Sunday against Manchester United, still the only team to take points off them this season.
They squeezed Spurs into their own half before the break. Mourinho had Serge Aurier on the right side of a fourman midfield, with Tanganga behind him. Harry Winks started his first league game since the defeat by Manchester United on Dec 4. This was supposed to be what Mourinho is best at, stopping the supposedly unstoppable in their tracks with a bit of cussedness and a lot of strategy.
Spurs had glimpses of goal in the first half. Dele Alli took a ball on his chest and guided it away from Trent Alexander-Arnold, but the right-back recovered. Later another quick out-ball looked as though it might give Lucas Moura a run on goal, until Virgil van Dijk stepped across the Brazilian and did enough to stop him accelerating.
The goal came when Firmino’s turn caught Tanganga out. Jordan Henderson had won the ball back quickly and from Mohamed Salah it went to Firmino, whose left-foot finish was past Paulo Gazzaniga before he could stretch out a hand. Spurs reached halftime still in the game and created more chances in the final stages. Moura took the ball off Georginio Wijnaldum and Son skied his shot. Lamela took Alli’s place behind Moura and the Englishman moved back into midfield. Aurier created the chance for Lo Celso.
At the end, all that remained was for Klopp to praise the generous dimensions of the away dressing room. “Thank you whoever built this stadium,” he said. “The dressing room is the biggest in the league. Other clubs are making their away dressing room smaller.” Another step conquered on the unbeaten run that goes on and on.