Owen in the promised land

Liverpool 2 Tottenham Hotspur 1

Say what you like about Liverpool, and no one seems to be queuing up to heap praise on them, they are doing a consummate job of leading the Premiership. Arsenal have had so many plaudits they have started to trip over them, yet the advantage keeps tilting towards Anfield.

Not even the most blind-eyed Liverpool devotee would describe their performance against Tottenham yesterday as spellbinding, but when it came to the crunch they emerged with the win, and with results elsewhere conspiring in their favour they suddenly have a four-point lead at the top. The only unbeaten team in England; it makes you wonder what they are going to do when they start to play well.

Yesterday was an unkempt performance littered with inaccurate passing, but just when it appeared that a draw was the best they could hope for, Michael Owen appeared in a blur of footwork with five minutes remaining to earn a penalty that he converted himself with a shot to Kasey Keller's left.

"The championship is very open and it's at an early stage," Gérard Houllier, the Liverpool manager, said, "but I'm happy that we have stepped up to take the lead." Asked about Arsenal's defeat and Man-chester United's draw, he replied: "I'm not bothered about the others. I told the players we have to keep focused on what we have to do."

Glenn Hoddle, his Tottenham counterpart, was less sanguine. "We should have got something," he moaned. "We played well. But Michael Owen is sometimes the difference between teams and he proved it today. We kept him quiet for a long periods, but when he gets into dangerous positions he's so fast.

"It's been a good day for them. A team have come here, played well, and yet they still won. But that's what the championship is all about. You have 38 games and you can't play silky football all the time. Sometimes you have to dig out results."

Scruffy? Certainly. Lucky? Possibly, but you cannot keep ascribing Liverpool's success to fortune. Even Sir Alex Ferguson has been impressed enough to describe a sequence of one defeat in 28 matches as a "hell of a run", and 27 points from 11 matches has set a scorching pace.

Scorching seemed a wholly inappropriate word for the first 70 minutes because there was little to recommend the game, and it was in keeping with the general malaise that the first meaningful shot of the afternoon, a speculative drive by Robbie Keane in the 22nd minute, should come to nothing because Gus Poyet got in the way of his team-mate.

That miss was also indicative of the general tempo of the game, because Tottenham had three chances that might have given them a decisive lead, all of them falling to Poyet. The first was after 38 minutes when he got ahead of his marker from Jamie Redknapp's corner and looked aghast when the contact was so meagre his header rolled by the post.

Then, after 62 minutes, there were two opportunities for the Uruguayan. A shot on the turn was denied only by an acrobatic leap from Liverpool goalkeeper Jerzy Dudek and, from the resulting corner, the Uruguayan's header was cleared off the line by Dietmar Hamann.

Spurs rued their luck and almost cursed it even more a minute later when Milan Baros, on for El-Hadji Diouf, primed Owen. The England striker had only a split second to shoot and in his hurry curled the ball over the bar.

That had been the home team's first tangible effort, and it appeared they were groping desperately for inspiration when Danny Murphy grasped the advantage with a delightful goal after 71 minutes. Hamann passed to him on the edge of the area and, with the options seemingly disappearing, he curled an exquisite shot into the top corner of Keller's net.

The momentum seemed to have swung comprehensively in Liverpool's favour, but Spurs have not reached such heights in the Premiership by accident and they equalised with nine minutes remaining. Central defender Dean Richards won possession from the disappointing John Arne Riise and arced a pass worthy of his manager to the left wing. Milenko Acimovic still had work to do, but the effort required to get outside Jamie Carragher allowed Richards time to make it into the area and when the cross came over he headed in from close range.

A draw seemed likely, but with Owen in your side anything is possible, and he conjured a winner from an unlikely position wide on the left. First he nutmegged Chris Perry and appeared to be accelerating past Stephen Carr when he was brought down. The penalty kick was not perfect but it was hard, low and enough. Liverpool won; Arsenal were beaten. As the Anfield announcer said when he read out the results from elsewhere, "Christmas has come early".

Liverpool 2
Murphy 72, Owen pen 86

Tottenham Hotspur 1
Richards 82

Half-time: 0-0 Attendance: 44,084