Liverpool has a one-goal lead to defend against PSG in the Champions League but that far from tells the full story of the tie at the halfway mark. Alisson Becker put in the showing of his life in Paris and Harvey Elliott snatched a late winner.
Ahead of the second leg, Elliott has been speaking about the performance. He says he wanted to repay Alisson for his heroics when he came off the bench, and within a minute, he had done just that by sliding the ball past Gianluigi Donnarumma.
“You want to die for him because he puts his heart on the line for us,” Elliott told Amazon Prime. “And [there’s] so many saves where I look at him and think, ‘How on Earth have you managed to go like that and save it?’.
“He’s unbelievable. I said in an interview after the game [against PSG], he was doing all these things and I felt like I needed to repay him, even though I wasn’t on the pitch.
“It was like I needed to repay him for everything, all the work that he’s done back there and he deserved, for me, I didn’t really want to get the highlight of that game, I wanted it to be Ali. We only won that game because of him.”
Liverpool will need to perform to a much higher level in the second leg and keep the ball much better than it managed in the Parc des Princes. Captain Virgil van Dijk says it might even be a harder game at Anfield than away from home.
“I think they are an outstanding team, a fantastic team, you can see the work rate they put in,” Van Dijk told reporters as he previewed the clash. “We obviously had a debrief after the game about it.
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“You could see them, if they lost the ball, pressing all of them together and running all together. It’s a big credit to the manager to put that work in and he made, in my eyes, a world-class team out of it.
“It will be tough on Tuesday and you will all see. I think anyone who before our game over there expected it to be a dominating performance from us, I don’t think they really looked at PSG throughout the season, also knowing that they were unbeaten for such a long time.
“We were prepared very well, and obviously we could have done better in some ways. But we know that on Tuesday it is going to be as tough, maybe even tougher, because they will have to come (and win). But we obviously want to win as well, to make sure that we go through.”
Liverpool.com says: PSG is the best team that the Reds have played so far this season so it is going to be a big test. With a one-goal advantage and the home leg still to come, though, you would hope that Liverpool can do enough to get over the line to book a place — likely against Aston Villa — in the quarter-finals.
