Neil Atkinson’s post-match review for The Anfield Wrap after Tottenham 1 Liverpool 2 in the 2025-2026 Premier League at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium…
IT’S AN emotional game.
I like a lot of other sports. Other sports have sequences of moments that match the emotion of your common or garden football match and they speak of them for years.
In The Ashes bowlers bowl spells carried by the sort of emotion which is any given twenty minutes of a Mancunian Derby and they live long in the memory.
Rory McIlroy deservedly won Sports Personality Of The Year because his golfing year has shared the sort of level of emotion the average Everton season has.
The darts right now deals on emotion, but 92 clubs live this 38 to 46 times a year. The game is emotion.
We love the game because of the emotion it is able to pull and draw. What you get from the stands, what happens on the pitch. The previous manager was a master of selecting and then getting players who could hit the emotional pitch. Emotion is all the good, is everything that matters. Emotion is the why. It is why you are reading this. Why you come from all over the world. Why you subscribe to The Anfield Wrap.
Emotion drives this writing, drives me to do this every day, drives our contributors to come in. Emotion is everything. I love emotion and emotional energy.
Yeah?
Bloody hell, Liverpool could do with dialling the emotion down.
Bloody hell.
It’s exhausting watching them. Draining. Tonight should have been straightforward especially after sense prevailed on Xavi Simons raking his studs down Virgil van Dijk’s calf. Liverpool looked the better side before then (just) but after then there was only going to be Liverpool until we hit the 80th minute.
Florian Wirtz looked constantly bright. It was, for the goal, a lovely ball from Hugo Ekitike to him, and then he weighted the ball beautifully to Alexander Isak who did the very thing he was bought to do.
Isak’s injury looked like a bad one. Liverpool will need to work that out. It is painful. It comes at the moment you got to see it. The point of the man is that goal. And Liverpool deserved it.
Liverpool deserved their second and when it came, it came from a big man being a big man. I love all of that. Your centre-forward should always want to be the biggest man in town and then there he was, Hugo Ekitike, getting what would become the winner.
It ought not have been complicated or fraught, it ought not have ended up with your heart pounding out of your throat.
Liverpool are not capable at the moment of just seeing it out. No corner has been turned. You cannot trust The Reds. You should not trust The Reds. They get swept along; they are currently left being antagonists and it will take some time to change.
Our opponents today are an odd side who define their own reality and Liverpool flounder on this rock. A weird form of sheer fuckoff’dness straining inside a skin that cannot contain them.
It is mad he didn’t start with Richarlison unless he just wanted to be able to bring Richarlison on. He is not a man to defuse any situation. He is a siege weapon in human form. I love him far more than I should any former Everton player. He clatters into football matches against us. He can’t help but light them up.
We’re in the midst of their dark night of the soul while we have our own. All of these straining, twitching imperfect forces biting at each other in the midst of the football match. Left crabbed and knotted, Janus like but snarling. Left just with sheer fucking feelings about wanting more, wanting different, wanting harder, wanting better. Just wanting, wanting, wanting.
We get the points and in the cold light of day there will only be the points – but we want, need, Liverpool to be better and be better now.
No matter.
This is a ground where for us, when we are here, mad shit happens. This season nine men. Last season nine goals. The season before nine men. The season before Darwin Nunez. The season before Harry Kane getting away with far worse than what Xavi Simons wasn’t allowed to get away with. Mad shit.
For the last twenty minutes only Virgil van Dijk and Alisson Becker actually play well. Everyone else is in the midst of the dodgems. Twisting and spinning. Cristian Romero is a divvy but he is not alone.
You’ve got to love the game. We love what it does to us. Love what it is about. There are days where it is too much, too overwhelming, too heart-rending. But it this is what makes it ours. What makes it matter and makes it count. The whole thing is far too unbidden and Champions should make it sit up and beg.
No matter. The points are in our boot. The delight is ours. Whatever Christmas is bringing you this year – and we never ever all get the same Christmas, my darlings – Liverpool borne the strain of the game before and just about delivered the goods.
Lads – let’s work on dialling the emotion down. Let’s work on being the protagonists especially when we have more men. Let’s work on the football match being without doubt.
But lads: Keep making it a joy to be alive. I want it all. I want grown up football and I want continental drifts of joy. I want life-changing moments with friends and 0-2 wins of sheer inevitability. I want Liverpool at their best and at their most boring. I don’t want a lot for Christmas. But maybe, obviously, endlessly I want too much.
This is Tottenham 1 Liverpool 2. Overwhelmingly they batter us on a personal, emotional and verging on physical level. But they hung on. They gave us this.
It’s an emotional game. And if you are lucky it is an emotional life. Whatever you are doing for the next few days, do it with my love, do it with Virgil van Dijk’s care. We are all in it together.
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