Shall we start with the case for Arne Slot blowing up the foundations of Liverpool’s football, rolling out a back three that most of his team hadn’t played at club level in years? The 3-4-2-1 in which their visitors lined up has given Paris Saint-Germain issues in recent memory and had it not been for a few inopportune red cards, it might have been the lineup with which Monaco knocked the holders out of the Champions League.
There’s also a compelling case to be made that the system Slot deployed on Wednesday is the long-term future for Liverpool. Last summer, they recruited two star strikers, a thoroughly modern number 10 and a wing back for each flank. If Mohamed Salah weren’t coming off an all-timer of a season, if they’d gotten Marc Guehi in those desperate last hours of the window: something back three/five adjacent might have been the established approach for Liverpool long ago.
It’s just that, well, this isn’t the established approach, evident in the 2-0 loss at PSG in the quarterfinal first leg. In fact, Slot’s Liverpool have formed themselves in a fashion approximating this one just once in his reign. And I’m not entirely certain that the 3-0 defeat inflicted on Kieran Morrison, Trey Nyoni and Freddie Woodman was ideal preparation for a trip to the Parc des Princes. Let’s broaden it out a bit beyond the two seasons that may be it for the current manager. Since the start of 2020-21, this team had played 282 European and Premier League games before this one. It will not surprise seasoned Anfield observers to discover that Liverpool played a back four in precisely all of these.
Your pre-match analysis might throw up that PSG are vulnerable to back threes; it doesn’t matter a jot if you can’t play it. And it only took a quick glance at Virgil van Dijk’s pleading with the rest of his backline to organise themselves midway through the first half to know that Slot’s gambit had spectacularly backfired. No one seemed to know where they should be standing or who they should be marking.
That is a real problem when your opponent refuses to give you fixed reference points. It is a problem for almost any defense when Ousmane Dembele drops off the frontline, dragging a center back with him. That could be mitigated if one of the back five steps into midfield, even if that is Van Dijk, whose legs probably have not been up to that task for a good few years now.
It certainly helps as well if that player is the same one; it looks a little chaotic to have Van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Ibrahima Konate darting up into no-man’s land. Their pressure on PSG’s center forward was not matched across the pitch, leading to what felt like a game stuck on repeat: Dembele moves, Liverpool follow and achieve little more than opening a lane for a pass into the space they’ve vacated, usually so well judged that Achraf Hakimi or Nuno Mendes can meet it at the byline.
Had PSG’s final ball and final shot been better, this tie would have been dead and buried. The Parc des Princes crowd urged their team to unleash their inner Hulk tonight. Ultimately, this felt like a mission that Hawkeye could have coasted through. Nah, honestly, Clint, leave the bow at home. You’ve got this.
After all, Desire Doue didn’t need to be a sharpshooter to strike PSG’s opener. Konate had missed a duel on halfway and Liverpool’s scramble defense had no sense of where they needed to be, of who should plug which gaps. That is how you end up with eight defenders in the penalty area, four surrounding the ball and nowhere near enough pressure to stop Doue from getting his shot away. Rather, you have just enough for the ball to flick off Ryan Gravenberch and over Giorgi Mamardashvili.
PSG’s second spoke to yet more confusion, this time caused by PSG’s positional rotation. When Khvicha Kvaratskhelia dropped into the left back slot, Dominik Szoboszlai or Gravenberch needed to stay alive to his movement. Neither did and one of the world’s most devastating forwards got a free run in behind. The end result was borderline humiliation as Gravenberch went tumbling, Mamardashvili couldn’t get a glove near the ball and two other red shirts crashed into their own net before Kvaratskhelia rolled into the net.
It might have been worse. Mamardashvili made four saves. Konate was reprieved by VAR’s partial intervention when Jose Maria Sanchez felt that what looked a fair tackle on Warren Zaire-Emery but he was lucky in the extreme that Carlos del Cerro Grande didn’t see enough to overrule the decision on the field when the Liverpool No. 5 brazenly pushed Nuno Mendes in the area. “We had the chances to score more and we should have,” said Kvaratskhelia.
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All of this seemed an almighty price to pay to nerf any attacking threat Liverpool might have carried. Matvey Safonov ended this game without a save to his name, only one of the three shots from the visitors came in the box. Dembele’s nine penalty box touches were as many as the entire Liverpool team. Short an extra attacker, Florian Wirtz and Hugo Ekitike were too easily bypassed by the press. Gravenberch and Alexis Mac Allister simply are not good enough to take on PSG’s hyper-midfield without a bit of extra ballast.
Through all those challenges, it was hard to grasp a sense of why Slot had chosen for his team to play this way. “They move around everywhere,” Van Dijk said of PSG after the game. “You have to communicate well. You have to follow your man. You have to take risks, wait for the right moment to win the ball and do them on the counter.” That sounds very complicated. How could it possibly be easier in a system you don’t play?
It is hard to shake the sense that Slot, who has struggled to coalesce on a system he likes ever since he had half a billion dollars of talent bequeathed on him, has only really worked out what he does not want to happen in the biggest games. Intent on mitigating his side’s defensive weaknesses, he has made Liverpool a more cautious side, a team ruthlessly intent on lowering the volume of events in their game. If that means doing without Salah, so be it. The retroactive justification for an approach like that is that Liverpool are still in this tie because they held PSG to 18 shots and 2.2 xG rather than the 25 odd worth three-plus they might have faced otherwise.
That doesn’t exactly redound to Liverpool’s credit, though, does it? A year ago, this team were a match for a side who would prove themselves to be the best in Europe over three and a half brilliant hours. This time, their manager was throwing out tactics he could not possibly know the efficacy of. That it didn’t end in disaster is far more a reflection of what PSG got wrong than anything that was in Slot’s power.
