Alan Shearer has rubbished Wayne Rooney’s suggestion that the Anfield atmosphere was disappointing as Liverpool crashed out of the Champions League against PSG earlier this week.
Rooney, making his first visit to the stadium, said he felt it “would have been a lot better”. But Shearer, who was also working as a pundit on the game, has disagreed with his verdict.
“The atmosphere was brilliant,” Shearer said on the Rest Is Football podcast. “It is fantastic at Anfield on European nights — it’s bloody amazing. But, and it’s a big but, Liverpool don’t score within the first 10 or 15 minutes.
“That is, I think, part of the opposition’s job, to try your best to quieten the crowd. And Liverpool had a couple of big chances.
“Mo Salah missed one, Nuno Mendes cleared it off the line, and once they didn’t score you start to think ‘uh oh’ and then they get hit on the break. But it was great to begin with. I thought it was great to be there, great football from two really good teams.”
“It was the best game of football I was ever involved in,” Arne Slot said during his post-match press conference. “I don’t have the history like Liverpool as a manager, but [it was] two teams of an incredible level [at] an incredible intensity.
“The first 25 minutes… OK, I also remember the first 25 minutes against Man City at home and the first 25 against [Real] Madrid, but this was unbelievable what we showed in the first 25. I looked at the scoreboard and we were 1-0 down.
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“Over 90 minutes I don’t think we deserved to lose this game of football today. Over 180 minutes, maybe it was deserved that we went to overtime. In overtime, I thought Paris Saint-Germain was a bit better than us in this half-hour, and then it comes down to penalties, and they scored four, us one, and we lost.”
Liverpool.com says: PSG deserves a lot of credit for being able to cope on such a big stage. Its players were exceptional technically and really stood up to the challenge. While it came down to the lottery of penalties, the right team went through over the 210 minutes.
As for the atmosphere, it wasn’t peak Anfield but it certainly wasn’t bad. PSG dealt with it by luck as much as judgment early on and then went ahead. After that, Liverpool had its moments without capitalizing properly.
