Conte’s Spurs have attacking weapons to derail Liverpool quadruple hopes

It was the worst of times. And it was also the worst of times. It is easy – and also probably best – to forget the most recent spike of Premier League Covid chaos, a febrile few weeks of Omicron-mayhem either side of Christmas that has now dissolved into just another note in the mildly hallucinogenic flipchart of crises and collapses that comprises the last two and a half years.

Scroll back five months and those dark December weeks were deeply unsettled.

There were whispers of another cancelled Christmas, of surges and spikes and circuit-breaker lockdowns. And of course in the middle of all this football kept trying to happen.

Seventeen Premier League games were postponed between mid-December and New Year’s Day. The 20 Premier League managers met to discuss a “firebreak” in the Premier League. Antonio Conte used a set of mannequins to make up the numbers in Spurs training, with no obvious falling away on the standards set during the Nuno Espírito Santo era. Jürgen Klopp began to talk about clubs not signing vaccine refuseniks as Covid blanked players’ names out of the squad lists.

And in the middle of all this Tottenham Hotspur hosted Liverpool on a dark, slightly crazed Sunday afternoon, with a feeling of mix and match teams, players picked out of a hat, tactics improvised on the hoof, and everyone just glad still to be out there moving around before the world closed in again.

As Spurs travel to Anfield on Saturday night for a game that could provide a decisive edge in the closing spasms of both the Premier League title race and the Battle For Fourth Place, there are two things worth remembering about that December fixture.

First, it was a stone-cold forgotten classic, a ragged startlingly carefree game of football, and