SO IT TURNS out the added control exerted by Arne Slot extends to the Premier League table.  

We’re not yet at the halfway stage and Liverpool are four points clear of Chelsea, six clear of Arsenal, 12 clear of Manchester City, 16 clear of Spurs and 17 clear of Manchester United…with a game in hand. 

It’s much too early to say this thing is Over, but the league hasn’t looked this Over at Christmas since Liverpool last won the league five years ago. Their statement, oh-bloody-hell-they-really-are-serious-about-this flourish that season came on St Stephen’s Day away to second-placed Leicester City, whom they pumped 4-0. 

Their equivalent performance this time has come three days before Christmas: everything Slot does, it seems, is ahead of schedule. 

This see-sawing, screwball 6-3 win over Spurs was Liverpool’s signature performance of this season: the game delivered a tennis result but Spurs could only make hay on their serve. Liverpool cruised to a 5-1 lead before switching off to allow Spurs a flicker of hope. They then promptly killed the game through Luis Diaz with the final goal, which gave the game a justifiable result. 

Even allowing for the fact Slot has the best squad in the league and Ange Postecoglou was shorn of four of his first-choice back five, this game was a case study in the willingness to adapt. 

“They have their way of playing and they don’t change it that much”, said Mo Salah after the game of Spurs, though did garnish his post-game survey by describing that way of playing as intense. 

Mo Salah celebrates his goal for Liverpool. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Thus Spurs continued to roll the ball out from the back with the profoundly unreliable feet of Fraser Forster, and out of possession their defensive line kept on sprinting high to the halfway line. 

This is the kind of space on which Darwin Nunez usually feasts, but Slot instead picked Luis Diaz as a false nine. Diaz dropped off and roved about, creating space for the galloping Dominik Szoboszlai, whose surging runs came sufficiently deep to nullify any Spurs’ hopes of playing offside. 

With Diaz dropping into a Liverpool midfield already stocked with Szoboslai, Alexis MacAllister and Ryan Gravenberch, Slot told Trent Alexander-Arnold to scale things back to basics: rather than invert into midfield, Alexander-Arnold was told to simply play like a right-back. 

Hence Alexander-Arnold swung a gorgeous cross onto the forehead of Luis Diaz for the opening goal, and Liverpool’s second and third goals came from powerful Szoboszlai runs: first he met a cross into the box that fell perfectly for MacAllister, and then he exchanged a one-two with Mohamed Salah to prod the ball through Forster’s legs. 

Salah made it 4-1 just after the break when Szoboszlai fluffed his lines from a couple of yards out, and goal number five came when Szoboszlai burst into the box and squared the ball back for Salah. 

The quality of Maddison, Kulusevski and Solanke’s finishing for their goals will be perversely maddening for Tottenham fans: how can a team capable of such high-calibre stuff continually kneecap themselves in such repetitive and comedic fashion? 

It is for this reason that Postecoglou’s days are numbered at Spurs. They are now 11th, only a point ahead of Manchester United, and Postecoglou is being exposed as one of the Premier League species with a short life-span: the ideologue lacking evangelicals.

Spurs would almost certainly have not conceded six goals today – and might not even have lost -  had all of Vicario, Van de Ven and Romero been available this afternoon. But, equally, Van de Ven’s forever-twanging hamstrings are surely not helped by the number of despairing, back-tracking sprints priced into his manager’s system of play. 

Postecoglou is also moving into the disastrous terrain of being appreciated by every set of fans other than his own: nobody wants to support the neutrals’ favourite. If Antonio Conte gave the impression he hated Spurs, Postecoglou is giving a vibe of being mildly entertained by Spurs; the curmudgeonly Football Man bored by the systematised machine teams winning trophies whose attention is held only by Spurs’ scampering eccentricities. 

Those watching Liverpool, by contrast, are watching the likely league champions. Even this side of Christmas, it’s difficult to see what might derail them.