Slot somehow emerges from Liverpool humbling as only second most pointless man at Anfield | OneFootball

As an NAC Breda teammate of Pierre van Hooijdonk in 2005, Arne Slot might well have traded thoughts on the art of management with his compatriot; they seem apt two decades later.

“People say we became champions, but so what?” Van Hooijdonk once said of his bitter Nottingham Forest exit. “If you were to change all the managers in the league for cats, at the end of the season there will still be one champion and three will get relegated.”

It springs to mind in an evaluation of a Champions League knockout tie in which Liverpool could hardly have put in two more disparate performances for precisely the same result.

Their passivity in Paris had the same effect as their ardour at Anfield, at least in a hell-for-leather, kitchen sink-adjacent, nothing-to-lose second half.

Both games – both tactical plans – ended in a 2-0 defeat and some difficult, chastening lessons taught by the reigning European champions. Three shots in the first leg produced as many Liverpool goals as 21 in the second. The sheer quality of PSG rendered the opposition managerial approach immaterial.

Except the first leg informs the second, and Liverpool lost this tie last week. Their attacking endeavour after half time represented a marked improvement but playing fairly well for a quarter of a two-legged knockout fixture will rarely if ever be good enough to advance at this stage.

And while Slot will cling to that fourth set of 45 minutes both privately and publicly as a means of deflecting criticism, it is worth pointing out that PSG scored twice in that period and Liverpool, despite the onus being on them to chase, failed to do so at all.

He claimed after the game that Liverpool “showed we can compete with the champions of Europe” after being held at arm’s length, patted on the head and thwacked in the face twice by Ousmane Dembele. There was more energy and more effort but that almost makes an eventual two-goal defeat at home even more damning than if the Reds had simply surrendered.

Liverpool tried this time and were still not close to the standard required.

So much of that still falls on Slot. If the plan was to drag PSG to a goalless first half before taking the game to them in the second, why waste Alexander Isak’s pre-planned 45 minutes and five meaningless touches on the initial part? Why go all-out attack only after removing British football’s most expensive ever attacker?

And why, on what was supposed to be another magical night at Anfield, was the disappearance of an entirely uneventful hour the closest thing to sorcery on Merseyside.

It could be argued that the tie might have turned soon after that with the award and eventual overturn of a Liverpool penalty, when Alexis Mac Allister collapsed under the vague weight of the concept of Willian Pacho.

Maurizio Mariani pointed to the spot as Mark Clattenburg debuted the referee expert’s curse as a backing track to what quickly unfolded.

“We can class this as a clumsy challenge by the PSG defender,” he said. “He does catch Mac Allister’s foot. Therefore, because there is a contact, VAR will accept the referee’s decision of a penalty kick. I don’t expect the VAR to overturn the referee’s decision, because there is a contact on the foot.”

Almost immediately after confirmation from lead commentator Jon Champion that there was “no suggestion from our position of VAR having any other involvement” came Mariani’s trip to the pitch-side monitor and U-turn after a quick enough check.

The curious thing is that Clattenburg wasn’t even really wrong: he acknowledged that “people will say it’s soft” but the “contact” meant that once a penalty was given, it ought to have been upheld. There was no clear and obvious error, no need for VAR to intervene.

As Clattenburg said: “Once the on-field decision was penalty kick, I would expect it to be given.”

But the paradox of an individual employed as an officiating specialist seeing his apparently factual explanation be instantly contradicted added an absurd air to what had been a thoroughly ordinary evening.

It unfortunately did not spark the game into life. Ngumoha was excellent and forced one good save from the wonderful Matvey Safonov, while Milos Kerkez ought to have done far better with a back-post chance carved out by Salah on the Egyptian’s final Champions League appearance for Liverpool.

That effort came in between the two Dembele goals which sealed Liverpool and very possibly Slot’s fate, as PSG stopped playing with their food and afforded themselves a couple of moments to indulge.

By the end, the role of Liverpool manager and Amazon Prime’s referee pundit was essentially the same: a cat could have done either job roughly as well.