We all assumed we were watching Igor Tudor’s last game as Spurs manager. A forlorn commitment to fulfil Tottenham’s contractual obligation to turn up and be embarrassed at Anfield once a year, in order to spare any new manager the humiliation and unpleasantness.
Instead we ended it wondering how many more games Arne Slot has as Liverpool manager. Familiar nonsense from Richarlison, familiar nonsense from Liverpool and extremely unfamiliar resilience from crisis club and walking punchline Tottenham all combined to deliver a wildly unexpected 1-1 draw between two teams both, in their own differing ways, struggling desperately.
Let’s get into it. Because there was a lot of it.
You take a 1-0 lead early on against a team with no confidence or belief in itself. You then sit on that lead. You slowly but surely allow that moribund opposition to dare to dream, to believe the inevitable might only be the seemingly inevitable. That they might be able to do something about it.
You drift along apparently oblivious to the increasingly obvious peril in which you have unnecessarily placed yourself. You concede a late equaliser via some horrendously half-arsed and small-brained defending.
Even then you fail to wake up and could in the end even have conceded all three points instead of only dropping an infuriatingly avoidable two against a team haunted by relegation fears.
It’s a scenario we’ve seen play out in plenty of Spurs games over the last 15 years or so. But never this way round.
Whenever we make a serious prediction based on careful study, it is invariably wrong. When we try to be whimsical or absurd, we have an alarming success rate. Just look at how we were chortling it up in our Big Weekend preview of this.
Spurs are betting everything on the idea it will end up being worth throwing this game away – despite then having only eight games in which to save themselves from themselves – in the hope that allowing the new manager a free swing in a dead rubber against Atletico Madrid and then hoping against hope for a bounce in the gigantic pre-interlull six-pointer against Nottingham Forest is a better Hail Mary than trying anything at all at Anfield, where misery has been all but guaranteed for season after season anyway.
The counterpoint to that, of course, is that this is itself an unusually vulnerable and fragile Liverpool team. Among Spurs’ current direct rivals, Forest have won here while both Leeds and Burnley have left with a point.
When you think about it, the new rock-bottom Spurs might actually manage to find this weekend could be that they accidentally draw this game and the sacrificial manager survives.
And there it is. Igor Tudor survives. Time will tell whether Spurs really are better off for what happened here today.
Fate forced Tudor’s hand here, with the Croatian even admitting that until late in the preparation his plans for this one involved Conor Gallagher in midfield. When Gallagher’s illness proved stubborn enough to keep him out, Tudor had to change again having already been robbed of a dozen senior first-teamers for various reasons new and old, short-term and long.
What he very obviously got right here – and what would still have been correct even had it ended in another defeat – were the formation and gameplan. With only two players even approaching centre-backs available, Tudor finally admitted defeat and at last abandoned any ill-starred variation on his back five.
Here was a team that had almost as many square pegs in square holes as is possible with a squad operating at the very limits of availability. It was a four-four-f*cking-two if ever we saw one. And it worked.
This was, at last, the sort of performance Tudor was supposed to get out of Spurs. This was the Mr Fixit who was promised. Somewhere along the way, this unfamiliar team of players at least playing in familiar positions… worked.
Two big men up top? Worked. Two centre-backs at centre-back, and two full-backs at full-back? It worked. A Pape Sarr-Archie Gray midfield is a callow one indeed to take on Liverpool, but they held their own in what was at least for each of them individually a familiar part of the pitch.
Spurs are Spurs so they still had an 18-year-old left-back starting at right wing, but the point stands. Here, more through necessity it must be said than anything else, Tudor found a team of players who could all do the job they’d been given and would all give everything to the cause.
Astonishing that it seems so astonishing, but there we are.
Or that of Mathys Tel – a young player whose career has not turned out remotely the way he thought, who has been treated pretty shabbily by Spurs but yet remains among the most reliably and whole-heartedly committed of the entire squad.
Or that of Gray, just turned 20, and perhaps the only player who can look both a) at his own effort over the last month and b) Tel in the eye.
But Gray and Tel we know will be significantly involved over the weeks ahead. The bigger and thornier decisions concern Danso, Dragusin and those most conspicuous by their recent absence.
The biggest decision of Tudor’s resuscitated Spurs reign comes now: what does he do with Micky van de Ven and Cristian Romero?
Both have been liabilities for several weeks now. Neither has been a reliable leader. Both have got themselves stupidly suspended. Neither should see an automatic route back into this team.
Right now, in this situation, you’d certainly take Danso over either of them. It seems a mad thing to say, but he might now be the first name on the teamsheet, regardless of how many centre-backs Tudor picks.
That, of course, is the other big call for Tudor. We know he’s a back-three man. We’ve seen the painful outcome of his previous stubbornness in preferring that set-up. But we’ve now seen how much better Spurs are when a simpler option is chosen.
Which centre-backs he picks in the next two games, that’s a tricky decision. How many he picks should not be.
Really, the sheer potency of this situation was such pure essence of Richarlison that everything that happened here now looks like it simply had to happen.
A combination of Anfield Richarlison, World Cup-year Richarlison and relegation-scrap Richarlison is a heady brew of Richarlisons indeed.
He was a pest all day long, and is another easy pick for Tudor or whoever happens to be Spurs manager at any given moment for the rest of this run-in.
He is not the purest technician. He is not a keen and careful protector of the ball. More than once in a game where Spurs inevitably spent much of their day on the back foot he was dispossessed in dangerous positions.
But he remains one of the purest chaos merchants that the Premier League has to offer, and on days like this he becomes a force of nature. Liverpool should need no warning about Richarlison’s propensity for mischief in this fixture. Since joining Spurs he has now scored four goals in seven Premier League games against Liverpool for Spurs, and 21 Premier League goals in 88 games against everyone else.
Yet they failed to heed any of the many, many warnings served today. Twice in the closing minutes of the first half Richarlison had headed chances; one went narrowly wide, one smartly saved by Alisson.
Twice in the second half Alisson was again called into action to deny Richarlison his goal. But from Richarlison’s fourth shot on target – as many as Liverpool managed in total – the goal finally came.
It was the least convincing contact of the lot, which probably worked in his favour as the ball scuttled into the bottom corner with Alisson powerless this time.
It was nothing more than Spurs in general and Richarlison deserved. And he kept his shirt on, which is the one and only reason Liverpool didn’t score an even later winner when they had the chance to break Tottenham hearts with a breakaway in added time to added time. Seasoned Richarlison watchers will have feared for him, but not this time.
For all the talk that this could be a vital and transformative point for Spurs, it really might also be a complete illusion. This was a weekend when Spurs, Leeds, West Ham and Nottingham Forest all picked up a big point in the fight against relegation. By definition, one of those points will prove not to be that.
And it absolutely could be this one. In leaving Anfield with a point, Spurs have merely matched the effort of Leeds and fallen short of Nottingham Forest’s. Burnley too left here with a 1-1 draw.
Spurs are catastrophically bad, sure, but Liverpool are absolutely not good.
They were poor throughout this game, really. They were poor at 0-0, poor at 1-0, poor before their substitutions, poor after the substitutions and poor even after the ultimate wake-up call of Spurs’ late equaliser.
That one break after a Spurs corner deep, deep into added time aside, if anyone was going to find a dramatic late winner here it felt like it was going to be Spurs. And that’s just plain nutty.
With just a fraction more composure and quality to a final pass here or a cross there, Spurs might even be celebrating a first win of 2026 rather than merely a first point in six games. We also put it to you that no other football club that exists, has existed or ever will exist would have a record of two points from seven games and those two points be against Man City and Liverpool.
This was a Spurs team without its two starting centre-backs, its most experienced defensive midfielder, and which appeared to have kept the manager in charge purely to avoid a new manager having any bounce hopes scuppered by the expected and customary Anfield unpleasantness.
But Liverpool just never ever got going despite being given every opportunity to do so. Spurs had conceded at least two in each of their last 11 games against domestic opposition. For Liverpool away to be where that streak ends is a stain against this team, however less sh*t Spurs might have been.
The most damning assessment came from Jamie Carragher on Sky Sports commentary: “This Liverpool side have made Tottenham look like a decent team.”
No wonder there were boos at full-time.
We all came into this assuming it was Igor Tudor’s last game as Tottenham manager, but how many more does Slot have with Liverpool? If it goes wrong in midweek, does he even get the rest of this season?
Szoboszlai is, obviously, an elite free-kick taker. This was his fourth goal direct from a free-kick in this season’s Premier League; everyone else has 12 between them. But this was nowhere near his best effort. We’d wager he hasn’t in fact struck a weaker one.
Yet in it went as Vicario shuffled and then flapped.
Igor Tudor has faced plenty of criticism for his handling of the goalkeeper situation. For picking Toni Kinsky in the first place against Atletico Madrid and then hauling him off when it went so wrong. But it wasn’t a decision from a clear blue sky. Vicario has been unreliable all season.
This was the 11th goal Vicario has conceded from outside the penalty area this season; no other Premier League keeper has been beaten from that range more than seven times.
You expected them to seize control from that moment against such a wounded and vulnerable opponent. Yet they didn’t. They dominated possession but not in any compelling way, and it was Spurs who ended the half creating the more compelling chances despite not managing a touch in the Liverpool penalty area between the 11th and 43rd minutes.
He is, inevitably and obviously, still a very raw talent. But what a talent. He is already a nightmare to face up one-on-one, and it’s worth noting here that he had an unusual job among Liverpool players today: in Pedro Porro he was up against a seasoned senior pro playing in his normal and preferred position.
Porro, to his credit, stood up to the task. But Ngumoha was a clear and rare positive on an awkward afternoon for Liverpool and it’s not hard to see a future where he’s a more regular fixture in starting XIs.
Certainly, the presence of the likes of Ngumoha in the team could not be said to be the cause of Liverpool’s problems.
Because if anything they got worse after turning to their subs’ bench for Salah, Hugo Ekitike and Curtis Jones.
In so many ways, this was damning. Arne Slot, having shuffled his team more than he likes to, then went to his bench earlier than he wanted.
And yet on a day when Spurs’ bench pointedly contained two goalkeepers, three kids, some empty chairs and just two senior outfielders, it was the visitors who won the substitution battle, with Randal Kolo Muani providing the assist for Richarlison’s late leveller and Xavi Simons livelier than any of Liverpool’s own subs.
You could put Cristiano Ronaldo at Man United in the same group, frankly. Once-great players who became a burden with astonishing speed.
Both Ronaldo and Son took a drop down from Premier League standard. Salah is surely about to make the same journey once this season is done.
The goal was a shambles. A bog-standard route-one missile from Vicario which Kolo Muani didn’t even really compete for initially until Andy Robertson presented him with the ball. He was then able to take three touches into the Liverpool area unapproached before laying it into the path of Richarlison – also unmarked – to sweep home. Quite how such ordinary football had so easily undone Liverpool is not easily answered.
Yet it didn’t fall out of a clear blue sky. This was a team that seemed determined to take the easiest challenge currently available to a Premier League team and make it needlessly complicated. Liverpool opted to lift-and-coast their way through the game, and the goal when it came for Spurs didn’t even have the air of smash and grab about it. It was just a fair result from a game between two poor teams.
You felt that if Spurs were going to get something out of the game it actually, in a way, suited them to keep the game at 1-0 for as long as possible. A Spurs equaliser in, say, the 65th minute risked rousing Liverpool from their slumbers. But watching how injury-time panned out we’re not even sure that’s true. Liverpool were in a funk today and we’re not sure anything could have lifted them out of it.
It’s understandable for fans to think the team just has to turn up to win a game like this, but it’s not great that the players apparently felt that way too.
But a late Spurs goal was always the likeliest hiccup, if hiccups there were to be. Liverpool have now lost three and drawn one of their last eight Premier League games. The three winners and now this late equaliser they have conceded have all come in the 90th minute or later.
But for the visitors it does feel like it could be the catalyst for something. Spurs have been desperate for a moment, for something, for anything, to give them the belief better days could be ahead.
This might in the end prove as illusory as the comeback point against Man City. But for now it is something. Spurs have something to hold on to, a couple of days’ respite where they will not be the butt of everyone’s jokes, and genuine reason to believe they can beat the drop. At least until they pick a back five and find themselves 3-0 down with a man sent off after 20 minutes against Nottingham Forest next weekend.
Tudor won’t avoid the jokes, though. He may still have his job, he may have a Premier League point but he is never beating the banter charges. Not while he’s going about thinking a Spurs staffer minding his pre-match business is in fact Arne Slot.
He even tried to alpha him in classic schoolboy fashion before realising his mistake. Even on a good day, Spurs still don’t win and are still Spurs. Maybe Tudor really does belong here after all.
