Liverpool are out of the Champions League but the worst could be yet to come
Liverpool 0-1 Paris Saint-Germain (PSG win 4-1 on penalties): A hugely disappointing night for Arne Slot came as Liverpool lost Trent Alexander-Arnold and Ibrahima Konate to injuries before the Carabao Cup final
A treble evaporates for Liverpool , and a double may yet go with it. This penalty shoot-out defeat to Paris Saint-Germain after a 1-0 loss didn’t just cost them a place in the Champions League quarter-final, but also a series of defenders for Sunday’s Carabao Cup final against Newcastle. Ibrahima Konate and Trent Alexander-Arnold are now in doubt, in developments that may end up the most significant of the night beyond elimination. Arne Slot admitted he’d be “surprised” if the right-back starts.
Liverpool have to quickly pick themselves up, after a deflating elimination that currently feels like the first time they are slightly faltering under Slot.
Against such talk of trebles and doubles, PSG showed an impressively singular mindset. It even came down to the focus of the number-one, in Gianluigi Donnarumma’s saves. The team generally radiated manager Luis Enrique’s belief that they would win and turn this around, with huge slices of luck only bolstering their belief rather than weakening it.
That was needed, because so much of this outcome went against history and expectation. Liverpool lost a shoot-out in the European Cup and Champions League for the first time, despite the club having won them in even tenser situations. It is also the first time they have been knocked out at Anfield having won a first leg.
PSG meanwhile came through, from a situation that is commonly held up as a test of nerve. That certainly goes against the club’s recent history. Maybe that’s why they needed Enrique’s certainty, above all else, more than Lio Messi or Neymar.
It might genuinely be a true threshold moment for the Qatari sportswashing project, their young team coming through where more glamorous and wealthy predecessors failed. Luis Enrique certainly agreed it was “important, for us, for the team”.
There is now a narrative richness to the likelihood that they will face Unai Emery’s Aston Villa in the quarter-finals, since he was the manager at the helm for that notorious 6-1 defeat to Enrique’s Barcelona.
There are so many storylines there, probably more than the Premier League tie we could have had between Liverpool and Villa.
Slot’s side will now be castigated for squandering an opportunity when they had been ahead and had been hailed as the best team in Europe.
That is perhaps a little harsh, since they just came up against a side that can now lay claim to that description.
PSG oddly weren’t as good as in the first leg, but they were more exacting, in what was genuinely an excellent match. Slot described it as “the best game of football” he had ever involved in.
“I don't have the history like Liverpool, as a manager,” he said. “Two teams, incredible level, incredible intensity... unbelievable what we showed in the first 25 and we were 1-0 down."
They were probably fitting winners over the full four hours of football, as even Slot hinted at.
“Over 90 minutes I don’t think we deserved to lose, over 180 maybe it was deserved we went to overtime. In overtime I thought maybe PSG was better than us. Then it comes down to penalties and they scored four.”
So much of the game was the reverse of the second leg, right down to the influence of a goalkeeper. Liverpool immediately subjected PSG to a real storm, only for the French team to this time enjoy the satisfaction of delivering a sucker punch.
It was maybe the effect of PSG’s sucker punch, that was all the worse because of the nature of it. With Enrique’s side again exploiting unusually open space in the Liverpool midfield, Dembele surged through, played it out to Bradley Barcola, who slid it back in towards Dembele… only for Konate to direct the ball away from Alisson and into the forward’s path.
The entire tie was suddenly thrown in the air out of nothing. Liverpool, for their part, kept just going at PSG with everything. Or, almost everything.The key final pass was always missing. There was a strange refusal to shoot in crucial moments. Maybe the most stark lesson of the tie is further emphasis that this forward line, as good as it’s been, isn’t to the level of PSG’s. Mohamed Salah certainly seemed well below his standards, with Nuno Mendes marshalling him well.
Luis Diaz was again erratic and imprecise. Diogo Jota is no longer showing the same precision. A moment that seemed to sum up the game was Salah playing a mishit pass to Diaz when in space, with the Colombian further miscontrolling it.
“ Liverpool deserved to score,” Enrique admitted. “But we dug in and persevered.” Donnarumma was looking much stronger than in the first leg, which was to become crucial.
Then there was poor Darwin Nunez, whose saved penalty seemed utterly inevitable.
By then, Liverpool were tiring, as illustrated in the substitutions.
The minutes before penalties were PSG’s main spell of control, their midfield spraying the ball around with such assurance.
What mattered was the assurance in penalties, and they more than displayed that. There was a foreshadowing of the way it was going to go through the manner that Vitina nonchalantly stroked home a kick that Alisson should probably have stopped.
Donnarumma followed his save from Nunez by getting down in an even more impressive manner from Curtis Jones.
Enrique summed it up well, after Desire Doue wrapped it up. “The first game belonged to Alisson Becker, the second game belonged to Donnarumma,” the PSG coach said, before praising his entire team.
“I think the penalties show the kind of team we are. The last one, a 19-year-old just despatches it.” Liverpool have now been despatched with it.
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