Smash and Grab win for Liverpool in Paris
Paris Saint Germain 0 Liverpool 1, 5th March 2025
PSG 0
LIVERPOOL 1 (Elliott 87)
The only statistic that matters in any sport you care to mention revolves around the final score between competing adversaries and to this end, Liverpool will hold a 1–0 1st Leg advantage come six days time and the return encounter in this titanic Champions League knock-out tussle. How they achieved such a feat will reverberate through their storied European history for decades to come and will surely be regarded as one of their greatest ever away victories in Europe and this is very far from emotional hyperbole. Whether watching live last evening or considering those damned statistics in the cold light of the following morning, the Reds were, in the Liverpudlian vernacular, “battered” for 87 minutes by a quite astounding PSG team who refused to allow them out of their own half in the first 45 minutes and when the game devolved into a thrilling basketball looking end-to-end thriller in the second half where the Reds were wasteful in rare possession of the football, PSG were magnificent, raining down 27 shots, 10 of which forced Alisson Becker into stupendous saves time and time again and whether it was shots on target (10–1), possession (71%-29%), passes (693–295) or corners (14–2), the home team in all blue thoroughly dominated a one-sided game in every aspect of the statistical game bar one, the most important statistic of all, the final score.
I don’t employ the word “hyperbole” often enough these days, so let’s use it again when stating some footballing facts rather than cold hearted statistics. Liverpool were extremely lucky on 20 minutes when Khvicha Kvaratskhelia’s beauty of a goal was ruled out by VAR for offside and mere minutes later, Ibrahima Konaté should have been sent off for a clear foul and the denying of a goal scoring opportunity for Bradley Barcola on the edge of the Reds penalty area. 30 minutes into the game and the Reds hadn’t even forced a corner let alone a shot on the home team’s goal and were simply camped inside their own half of the field, wasteful in possession, unable to escape, and thankful they had the world’s greatest goalkeeper defending his goal like a man possessed and in a display he’d later describe as “the performance of my life”. When not in a seemingly constant match long duel with the brilliant Georgian winger Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Alisson Becker was simply unbeatable as he saved Ousmane Dembélé’s long range drive on 20 minutes, a stinging bullet of a shot from Achraf Hakimi 2 minutes later before denying Ousmane Dembélé 3 minutes later still as PSG laid siege to his goal. Although the giant Brazilian in the Reds goal would rack up a host of second half saves as he frustrated substitute Désiré Doué twice in 4 minutes (the second of which was a wondrous flying save on 79 minutes) as well as Ousmane Dembélé again on 83 minutes and a simple near post save that denied Nuno Mendes deep into injury time, between the 28th and 55th minute he denied Khvicha Kvaratskhelia a goal his brilliant performance merited on four separate occasions and whilst I wish they could, my simple words can’t do justice to what a supreme, otherworldly performance Alisson Becker treated the watching world to last evening. Little wonder he described it as the performance of his life! From his flying, full length save on 28 minutes to his even better one-handed save 8 minutes to deny the Georgian after a wonderful, dancing run on goal, to an even greater, flying one-handed save to deny him once more from a free-kick on 53 minutes to a more routine save 2 minutes later, Alisson Becker refused to be beaten last evening and when he was, with irony dripping from every footballing pore, the Georgian’s wonderfully curling shot on 20 minutes was ruled out by VAR by the thinnest of margins imaginable. It rather summed up the night entire, as Liverpool got the rub of the Champions League green, scored with their only shot on target in the entire evening, Alisson Becker started the move that led to Harvey Elliott’s winning goal and on any other night, any other night, this would have been a mere consolation goal on the back of a 4 maybe 5 or even 6–1 walloping.
But the only statistic that counts is the final score, and the Reds will begin next Tuesday’s return leg in Liverpool with a 1–0 advantage. It’s only half-time and talking of which, for nigh on ten minutes, maybe more post half-time in the game last evening, the PSG fans (who were raucous and magnificent all evening) sang their own version of Bonnie Tyler’s 1977 hit “It’s A Heartache”, a trend that seems to be sweeping many European teams and whilst I’m glad the Reds aren’t following suit, it sounded delightful all the same and perhaps, just perhaps, they knew Harvey Elliott was going to break their hearts so late in the game, and with his first touch of the football after coming on as substitute too. A flight of fancy on which to close matters here after a surreal night of football whereby one team could have won by 5 or 6 goals and the two-legged cup tie already wrapped up, but instead trail by a goal heading into the second leg in a Champions League knock-out game far from over. There’s sure to be heartache and or even heartbreak for both of these teams in this competition as despite their respective pedigrees and Liverpool’s almost unbeatable run to this stage of the competition, whomever triumphs on Tuesday face the almost certain prospect of Aston Villa in the Quarter-Finals and the winner of the two Madrid giants, Real or Atletico, and their tussle with Arsenal, in the Semi-Final.
Football is a “fool’s game” and the chase for the “cup with the big ears” starts now.
Arne’s Afterword
“I think if we had a draw over here we would have already been lucky, that’s clear for everyone. I think they were the much better team today, especially in the first half, they had a lot of open chances — three or four big, big, big chances. In the second half they were still the better team, still had a lot of shots on target, but they were mainly from outside the box. So, all these shots from outside the box were with a certain speed that you only see with top players. We have them as well but you could see it with them as well that’s why Alisson still had to make a lot of big saves. We were lucky in the first half that the goal was fractionally offside and in the end, we were already in the game three, four or five times. I felt like, ‘We can hurt them in transition,’ but we didn’t. But we waited until the last moment and then we hurt them”.
“If you look at the result, we come away here really positive but if you look at the performance then they are two different things. I think Paris Saint-Germain take a lot of positives towards the game we are going to play in a week. But I can tell you, they’re not only going to play against us, they are also going to play against our fans — and we really need them. Not only next Tuesday, but we need our fans on Saturday against Southampton as well. Like you might know, we don’t have a winter break in England so we just keep on playing for months already and these players are definitely going to need the help of our fans to show up two times as they did in the last few months”.
Thanks for reading. I pen my thoughts on every Liverpool game and in recent seasons, with the addition of numerous pieces of retro writing on Reds games of the past, I’ve curated and created the following two self-published books:
"A final word from The Boss" - link to Amazon
"Chasing the Impossible and a Sword of Damocles" - link to Amazon
Whilst you’re here I may as well brag about the release of my trilogy of recently self-published books too. Beautiful covers eh! As the title(s) would suggest, this is my life at the movies or at least from 1980 to 2024, and in volume 1 you’ll find 80 spoiler free appraisals of movies from debut filmmakers, 91 of the very best films appraised with love and absent of spoilers from 1990–2024 in volume 2, and in volume 3 you’ll find career “specials” on Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino together with the very best of the rest and another 87 spoiler free film reviews from 2001–2024.
All available in hardback and paperback and here are some handy links:
"A Life at the Movies Vol.1" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.2" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.3" - link to Amazon