Liverpool are back atop the Premier League because Spurs can’t help being Spurs

Hello! Welcome to another installment of Tactically Naive, SB Nation’s weekly soccer column. This week we are sponsored by Wayne Rooney’s smile. Isn’t it a lovely thing? So good to see him happy.

Football matches are long old things, and yet it’s the tiny moments that define them. Much of Spurs’ visit to Liverpool was forgettable, and quite a lot, from a Spurs’ point of view, was pretty decent. After a limp first half they recovered well, caused Liverpool problems, picked up the equaliser, and could well have won.

But they didn’t, thanks to two moments. The second, Liverpool’s winning goal, came right at the end. The most compelling thing about farce is the inevitability of it: the pie is going into the face, and everybody knows it. The only question is how.

In this case, the how turned out to be mostly down to Hugo Lloris. First he chucked it into the legs of one of his defenders, then he flapped feebly at the thing as it dribbled back over his goalline. He’s in an odd place, Lloris; senior player, captain, and increasingly a liability. The mistakes are getting bigger, and coming more and more often.

But as amusing as the goal was, it was only the second most important of the game’s big moments. The first came a few minutes earlier, as Liverpool pressed for a winner and Spurs, taking advantage of the space, looked to hit them on the break.

Harry Kane recovered the ball deep inside his own half and fired a quick ball to the feet of Son Heung-Min, who knocked it inside to Moussa Sissoko. Both Spurs players set off running. Suddenly, they had a two-on-one.

That one, however, was Virgil van Dijk, who is having a pretty strong time of things in red. The basic principle of a two-on-one breakaway is that the defender goes to the player with the ball. They then move the ball on to the other attacker, who scores, unless the goalkeeper stops them. Simple, smooth, and straightforward.

Van Dijk, however, decided to try something else. Instead of moving towards Sissoko, he stayed on Son, cutting off the pass, inviting the man in possession to take his best shot. In essence, he had the following thought …

There’s no way Sissoko’s going to score with his left. He’s Moussa Sissoko. He’s going to smack this into the middle distance.

… and gambled that he was correct. He was, and he looked like a genius.

The thought wasn’t the clever part. After all, we can be fairly certain that the same thing occurred to literally everybody else: the tens of thousands of people in the stadium, the hundreds of thousands of people watching on television, all of Van Dijk’s teammates, all of Sissoko’s teammates, the referee, his assistants, Mighty Red, and, chances are, Sissoko himself.

Still, thinking it is one thing. Acting on it, and breaking the unwritten rules of two-on-one defending, is quite another. After all, the punishment for being wrong wouldn’t just be conceding a goal, losing the game, and quite possibly blowing the title race. It would be doing all that and looking really stupid.

Or perhaps there was no risk at all. Spurs are Spurs, after all, which means the always extant possibility of Spursiness. And Spursiness, if it exists, exists in the weird moments: when something is offered and not taken; when something is taken, almost, but then dropped.

All a clever defender needs to do, then, is stay the hell out of the way, and let Spurs get on with it.

That win puts Liverpool on top of the Premier League table again, by two points, having played a game more than Manchester City. It also makes a complete mess of positions three through six — Spurs, Arsenal, Manchester United, and Chelsea are all within one point of one another, and four into two doesn’t go.

The Race for Fourth is often derided, correctly, as a contrived thing: there’s no trophy, only the security of Champions League qualification, with the attendant benefits of money and a better class of transfer. But with four teams like this — all good, all flawed — it can be solid entertainment.

Somebody, at some point, is going to cost their club millions of pounds by falling over against Burnley. That’s what the Premier League is all about.

Over in the Netherlands, another title race was getting suitably spicy. Ajax hosted PSV knowing that anything other than a win would likely deliver the title to Eindhoven. And though they took an early lead, they were almost derailed in the 57th minute when Noussair Mazraoui did this to PSV’s Angelino.

It really is an extraordinary foul. Sure, the ball’s bouncing, but by the time he jumps it’s nowhere to be seen. We should probably assume he wasn’t trying to kick the other man in the head, because that would be extremely unpleasant and we like to pretend the world is basically decent … but it does look a lot like he was trying to kick the other man in the head.

Then he gets a booking, a remarkably incorrect piece of decision-making. Fortunately, the ever-watching eye of VAR is at work in the Netherlands, so the referee was invited over to the touchline to get it right. Which he did.

But just for a second, as the referee comes back onto the field pointing at the yellow card and shaking his head, you can see Mazraoui think:

Ah, of course, I’m not even getting booked. Why would I? I was going for the ball.

And then, once the red comes out:

Oh, of course, I’m getting sent off. Well, I did kick that man in the head.

A minute later, PSV equalised.

That left PSV half an hour, against ten men, to finish off the title race. Happily for fans of title races and general nonsense, they failed completely. Ajax retook the lead in the 72nd minute, then scored another deep into injury time. It could have been an eight-point lead; now it’s down to just two. A metaphorical kick in the head, to go with the real one.