Everybody seems to be having an off-day when they play against Liverpool

Liverpool keep doing Liverpool things. The Premier League is now theirs to lose, and for a manager in his first season in England, that is a remarkable achievement

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Eventually, there comes a point at which the fact that everybody seems to be having an off-day when they play against Liverpool has to be taken as a Liverpool thing rather than a quirk of the calendar. They head into the Christmas programme four points clear of Chelsea at the top of the table with a game in hand having lost only one of 16 games. While this will always in part be the season when Manchester City imploded, it should also be pointed out that Liverpool at the moment are on course for 93 points; only four times has the champion ever won more than that.

Even with Liverpool’s consistency there’s a tendency to look at Sunday’s 6-3 win at Tottenham as a result of the inexcusable openness of Tottenham rather than of their own excellence. And it is true that it’s easier to play Spurs right now, when they’re missing Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven, when Ange Postecoglou is doubling down even further on doing things his way, than it might have been at certain other points of the season. But at the same time, Spurs tend, relatively at least, to be better against teams who come at them, who give them space behind the defensive line they can attack, and until the game disintegrated into mass silliness in its final quarter, Liverpool gave them a lesson.

This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he’ll answer the best in a future edition

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