MATCH ANALYSIS
De Zerbi came out of Anfield with credit, and you would never guess it from the coverage
Liverpool beat us 3-1 at Anfield. That is the result, it is in the record books, and I am not interested in arguing with it. What I am interested in is the gap between what actually happened over ninety minutes and the version of it that survived into Wednesday morning.
Here is what the people who watched properly wrote. Spurs controlled spells of that game. Spurs created chances. Spurs looked like a side with an identity rather than a collection of expensive strangers. Those are not my words being generous about my own club, that is the read of the night from people with no reason to be kind to us. The manager came out of a defeat at Anfield with his reputation higher than it went in, which is not a thing that happens by accident.
What controlling spells at Anfield is actually worth
Understand the setting before you decide what it means. This is the ground where sides with far better league positions than ours go and spend ninety minutes chasing the ball. We went there with a rotated team, with players missing, in the middle of a run where the goals had dried up completely, and we had periods where the game was played on our terms. You do not get that from organisation alone. You get it because somebody has taught a group of players how they want to play and the players have understood it.
A defeat that tells you what a team is becoming is more useful than a win that tells you nothing. I would rather lose like that than beat somebody by accident.
The bit that will not survive the weekend
None of this will be in the Saturday preview. The preview will say winless, it will say seventeenth, it will say pressure, and it will get filed by somebody who did not watch Tuesday. That is the actual complaint here. Not that we lost a cup tie away at Liverpool, which happens to plenty of good teams, but that a genuinely encouraging night has been flattened into a number in a column because a number is easier to type. Easier to type, and easier to sell, to an audience that has been taught for years that a struggling Tottenham is the funniest thing in football. Somebody taught them that. It was not us.
I will keep score my own way. We went to Anfield, we played, we scored, we lost, and the manager came home with more credibility than he left with. Put that next to the table and tell me which one is describing the direction of travel.