  The effective field theory likelihood for the density field of biased tracers
allows for cosmology inference from the clustering of galaxies that
consistently uses all available information at a given order in perturbation
theory. This paper presents results and implementation details on the
real-space (as opposed to Fourier-space) formulation of the likelihood, which
allows for the incorporation of survey window functions. The implementation
further uses a Lagrangian forward model for biased tracers which automatically
accounts for all relevant contributions up to any desired order. Unbiased
inference of $\sigma_8$ is demonstrated at the 2% level for cutoff values
$\Lambda \leq 0.14h\,{\rm Mpc}^{-1}$ for halo samples over a range of masses
and redshifts. The inferred value shows the expected convergence to the ground
truth in the low-cutoff limit. Apart from the possibility of including
observational effects, this represents further substantial improvement over
previous results based on the EFT likelihood.
