Neil Atkinson’s post-match review for The Anfield Wrap after PSG 0 Liverpool 1 in the 2024-2025 Champions League last 16…
WHERE do you start?
A million places to choose from.
You can start with a club who has Europe’d a thousands ways down the years.
You could go with the goalkeeper who yet again demonstrated he is the best one.
You could talk about the clean sheet, the classic European approach dealing with the modern era. Slogging your guts out to get a crack European outfit back to our place to show them what’s what. The throwback.
You can talk about the forgotten men linking up. Football miracles on a weekly basis, season after season. And the unlikely heroes who provide them.
But I want to start with them. With Paris Saint-Germain. Soft in my old age you know; I’m losing my edge. It’s worth remembering what their ownership is, but then also remembering who their support is and how deeply proud they will be by a team suddenly, devastatingly hewn in their own image. They were marvellous until they weren’t tonight. They were the best team Liverpool have faced all season.
And then the inspiration went. I understand it. I’ve lived it. Lived Liverpool teams being in the ascendancy, but unable to convert or even suddenly chisel good chances. That moment of: “Oh. Oh God. This.”
Them being so good for so long is what creates the positives of this Liverpool win. There is no nobility in a rearguard action against chumps. Only against champs.
Ousmane Dembele verges on unplayable at times, but you have to play him. Have to find a way to defend him which won’t be about winning, but will be about not definitively losing.
The reason football isn’t basketball, and the reason football is better than basketball, is that you can both be dominated and do alright. You can be second best, but the structure can mean that doesn’t result in punishment. You could produce a compilation reel of Dembele making Liverpool players look daft tonight, but at no point does he get a clear-cut shot.
Even the basketballers know this. That you cope in the round. Too often there is a desire to reduce the game to the compilation in this era, but Dembele himself goes home having lost because while he won, he never could quite win by enough.
He isn’t alone. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia is a lovely player. All balance and power. All output too, like Dembele this season. He’s a ravenous footballer, the essence of the cliched player deprived of red meat. He takes great chunks out of the game. But even he can’t quite get close enough, can’t quite become undeniable.
Because Alisson Becker. Because the world’s best goalkeeper is having a special evening with everything he brings to the party. Every special save and special flourish. He does it like nobody else. This matters. This is part of the magic.
His Brazilian compatriot and competitor at Manchester City kicks like nobody else you have ever seen. But Becker, Becker does every other part of goalkeeping as an entirely unique proposition.
The best conventional goalkeeper on the planet is Thibaut Courtois. Courtois was built in a lab. He is like a baddie in The Boys. He is a spectacular mechanism. Inspector Gadget meets Dolph Lundgren.
But Becker was built by angels, by artists, by jazz musicians. He’s Miles Davis on a good day, adding a flourish where one didn’t need to exist until the very moment he added to it, then it feels like it always had to be there. He’s redefined the position if anyone can keep up with him. One day they will, the kids are always coming up from behind.
Trent Alexander-Arnold puts in his best performance of the season; the very essence of winning the right battles, losing the right battles and drawing the right battles. The very essence of calm under fire.
You can’t win them all. Battered and bruised we know that, but we also understand the difference between losing and passing on. We understand holding up. We understanding digging deep.
Him and Andy Robertson both did that. They are marvellous players, but more than that tonight, brilliant warriors who understand the aim of every battle is to stay intact to fight the next one.
You’d have probably taken 1-0 on 53. If you were paying attention, you’d have seen two teams tiring by 65, not just one. On 78, speaking to Steve Graves I said: “I fancy us here 0-2. Owen. Rome.”
On 83, I’d have been all in for a draw. And then that. That.
It was a winner in slow motion. You see Darwin Nunez outbattle Marquinhos and suddenly the whole pitch opens up. The ball was perfectly weighted. And there it was. They are always unlikely men, aren’t they? Again and again.
The three subs, other than the excellent Curtis Jones, have had moments this season where they haven’t felt as though they fit and then there you are in Paris and each of the three fits to perfection, finds their moment and yet again pushes themselves into Liverpudlian folklore.
It shouldn’t work that way, but this is what football does. On the rarest night where Mo Salah and Ryan Gravenberch fall short, there is suddenly Wataru Endo, Darwin Nunez and Harvey Elliott. Incredible seasons are created by the most solid and reliable and excellent footballers. But seasons are garnished by the support acts who steal a scene with gusto and we are blessed with the most marvellous scene-stealers.
Elliott is the most one of ours precisely because he wants to be. The way this city works is we love those who love us, who want in. That away end, every away end is full of those from outside who just want to be in and nobody should ever stop them.
Were he not enormously gifted, Elliott would be casing everyone for spares for this game and that. He’d be up and down the motorway, banging on about The Reds to anyone who’d listen. His Liverpudlianism is as vital as anyone else’s; he’s moved to the city to make a go of it. Grafts any way he can to play his part on Saturday with the boys.
He’s had moments, but suddenly now he could have the moment. The moment which sets up a European Odyssey. The moment which offers the springboard.
And much needed. To return to where we started – Paris are good. Paris are very, very good and Paris are capable of winning at Anfield. They could have taken the tie away from The Reds in 30 minutes tonight. You know it, I know it. And so they could win at our place. We shouldn’t be complacent about that. Next week Liverpool will have to be good. Very, very good.
But I back them. I back you and me as well. Where do you start when you haven’t finished? It is just half time and we get to soundtrack the second half. We get to set the scene. We get to do the second part of the classic European performance, but none of that happens with complacency.
It is possible that it is half time with the only team in Europe able to hold a candle to Liverpool. I’m not so sure about that, but am absolutely certain this is a Liverpool team full of courage, excellence and determination.
More to come. Relish it. Throwbacks and football miracles. Arne Slot is something special; his team is something special. His team is something we’ve seen before. You build on the back of what you have been, you build on the back of what was.
Where do you start? Well, on nights like this; lucky nights, determined nights, miraculous nights, you sort of want to say 1892 and go from there.
Liverpool. Promise.
