At the end of the day, three points is three points is three points. How Liverpool got to three points on Saturday against Tottenham, though, hardly seemed positive beyond the scoreline. More than that,
it was a performance that most of the time one would expect to very much not result in a positive outcome.
Liverpool created little, benefitted from Tottenham errors for their goals, and watched their opponents foolishly take themselves down to ten and then eventually nine men. Then Liverpool almost imploded to nine-man Spurs, conceding one and, on multiple occasions, almost a second to throw away those three points.
“They fought a lot for the result in the last 20 minutes but we were brave enough to keep the result,” was Alisson Becker’s take on the difficult result. “Of course we are not happy for conceding—the clean sheet was a big goal as well for us, to keep the consistency—but three points away against Tottenham, we take that
“That’s part of playing in the Premier League. Playing here for a while, you know that the last 10 minutes are often the most dangerous ones. When we were in a way controlling the game, I think we could have done a little bit better with the ball, bringing more threat to their defence. But at the end they just fought.”
Fought they may well have, but Liverpool certainly didn’t do much to help themselves, regularly hitting the ball long rather and handing it back to their opponents instead of seeking to take advantage of the fact they had two additional outfield players on the pitch at that point and looking to maintain possession.
It was hard not to look at that, a Liverpool side a bit lucky to be up two goals—but quite deservedly up two men and maybe even unlucky not to be up three for a horror tackle on Alexander Isak after his goal—and seemingly too mentally fragile to take advantage of their numerical advantage and feel good about it all.
Still, at the end of the day three points is three points. And at the end of the day, Liverpool got them, are now unbeaten in six matches, and from a certain point of view it doesn’t matter how. Moving forward, though, there clearly remains work to do for a side that has struggled to live up to expectations in 2025-26.
