The inevitability of Richarlison’s 90th minute equaliser for Spurs on Sunday afternoon was overwhelming. We’ve seen this movie so many times already this season. Liverpool fail to be ruthless. Liverpool begin to panic. The game breaks wide open and Liverpool offer ocean liners full of encouragement to their opposition. Finally, they concede in the dying embers of the game. A team once lionised as the ‘mentality monsters’ have become a quivering wreck.

There’s a reason I haven’t been writing here as much as I planned to recently, I haven’t wanted to simply write negativity week after week, instead hoping that there would be shoots of recovery around the corner. A bad season could be rescued to a small extent and end with positivity and optimism heading into the summer. However, on Sunday at Anfield the end of the road came into view and there doesn’t seem to be a corner left to turn.

Let’s be clear about this, Spurs are – on form and in reality – the worst team in the Premier League right now, with a manager seeing out what was sure to be his final game before being sacked after a fifth straight defeat. They found some previously unseen fight as the game went on, but they were a bad team missing so many players through injury that on their bench sat a young lad who couldn’t get in the Hearts team before his move to London in January. There for the taking more than any other side who has visited Anfield this season.

This is the team that Liverpool failed to put away. It was just the 18th minute when Dominik Szboszlai whipped in a free kick that Guglielmo Vicario really should have saved but instead just helped into the back of the net. Seventy-two minutes remained to pile onto Spurs’ misery. A second goal would have surely seen them fold, would have turned into three or four. It never came. It never looked like coming.

There were flashes of excitement from Rio Ngumoha – and it says volumes about this season that a 17-year-old who can simply beat his man either outside or inside provokes so much anticipation, because there has been so little to get excited about with this Liverpool team. But those flashes evaporated when he was taken off just after the hour and with him went Liverpool’s hopes.

What played out instead was a long trudge towards the inevitability of Richarlison’s thoroughly deserved equaliser. A trudge that was too much for many to take. Thousands left as the Brazilian swept the ball into the net, many of those who remained let their frustration be known as boos rang out at full time. This felt like the day when the dam burst things became terminal for Arne Slot – with the fan base at least.

To offer Slot some defence, there have been many mitigating factors, all of which have contributed to Liverpool’s awful season and there is plenty of blame to go around. The recruitment left him with an unbalanced squad which has no pace or threat in wide areas. The club had to come to terms with an unspeakable tragedy in the summer, which Slot handled with the utmost dignity and class. There have been countless individual mistakes from players throughout the season – often from players who would be the last you’d think would make such errors.

But there is no mitigation for the lack of control Liverpool have been able to exert on games. For the apparent lack of game plan to deal with the long ball threat about which Slot has been only too eager to talk in the media. For the lack of in-game management and ability to affect the game from the bench. For the fact that so often Liverpool look like one of the worst coached teams in the league, hoping to get by on a piece of magic from one of our players or a mistake from one of theirs. For the fact that they have sleep-walked into the same trap on so many occasions this season.

Being Liverpool manager is no easy job. Being Liverpool manager in the wake of Jürgen Klopp is a job that many managers would have been too scared to take on. Arne Slot not only grasped that job but gave us one of the best afternoons of our lives, bringing the 20th league title to Anfield. However, the past can only excuse so much in the present and for me, like so many others, Sunday was the point at which his credit in the bank finally ran out. There is no sense that he has what it takes to turn this around and return to the place we were last May.

The question of who does remains a live one. There’s one obvious choice and many Liverpool fans would readily make that bet right now, but beyond Xabi Alonso there is an apparent void of ready, waiting and available elite managerial talent. And this is a decision that Liverpool must get right. This club knows all too well how a lost season can become a lost generation very quickly. But neither is fear of that failure an excusable reason to not make a decision at all and simply drift along with the tides until you end up running aground.

I like Arne Slot. I want Arne Slot to repeat the success he has already had at Liverpool. But I can see no path along which that route lies. Sad as it is to say, it’s time for Liverpool to shake him by the hand, write a cheque for his pay-off and buy him a ticket back to Rotterdam.