Good evening and welcome to live coverage of the Champions League quarter-final, first leg match between the champions, Paris Saint-Germain, and Liverpool at Parc des Princes. Thirteen months ago this was the pick of the round of 16 ties and comprised two terrific games, Liverpool\u2019s 1-0 victory in the Eternal City coming by virtue of Harvey Elliott\u2019s late goal, a minute after coming on as a substitute, and a virtuoso act in goal by Alisson. A week later Ousmane Demb\u00e9l\u00e9 would level the tie at Anfield in one of the finest European matches this author has ever seen before PSG and Gigi Donnarumma saw off the hosts in the shoot-out, the giant octopus of a goalkeeper making magnificent saves from Darwin N\u00fa\u00f1ez and Curtis Jones, both of which were respectable efforts.<\/p>\n
Liverpool would go on to win the Premier League, PSG their 13th Ligue 1 and maiden Champions League and although tonight\u2019s home side decided to get rid of Donnarumma which has demonstrably weakened them, the visitors\u2019s starting XI is in far worse shape a season on despite their massive outlay, having tragically lost Diogo Jota and, more prosaically, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Luis D\u00edaz.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Their 4-0 defeat by Manchester City in the FA Cup and recent defeats by Brighton and Wolves in the league have exposed glaring defensive vulnerabilities. While all the focus has been on Mohammed Salah\u2019s waning powers, Virgil van Dijk\u2019s have been overlooked and could give Demb\u00e9l\u00e9, Bradley Barcola and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia the space to run riot unless Liverpool wake up. And they won\u2019t have Alisson, missing with an unspecified injury, to bail them out if they let those three gazelles run in behind. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Wataru Endo, Conor Bradley and Giovanni Leoni are still unavailable and will be for the rest of the season but Alexander Isak, English football\u2019s most expensive player, has travelled. PSG, who lead Ligue 1 by four points with a game in hand, are at full strength apart from Fabian Ruiz and young Quentin Ndantjou.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Good evening and welcome to live coverage of the Champions League quarter-final, first leg match between the champions,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":881284,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[8815],"tags":[9261,236651,1121,748,1614,393,94,236650,4884,241094,179,763,1128,7580,93,16,15,227594],"class_list":["post-881283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-liverpool","tag-alexander-isak","tag-apple-news-free","tag-arne-slot","tag-britain","tag-champions-league","tag-england","tag-football","tag-football-live-blog","tag-great-britain","tag-live-priority","tag-liverpool","tag-liverpool-fc","tag-mohamed-salah","tag-psg","tag-sport","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-us-content"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116371929555659441","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=881283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881283\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/881284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=881283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=881283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=881283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}