I do remember Jones coming on and having the quality, skills and composure to keep the ball a bit and keep it moving by making himself available.
I am sure Slot’s halftime speech was ‘Just hold on for dear life, I have a plan’. 
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Yeah I commented earlier that I thought Jones was very good when he came on as was all our subs
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…and you say it a third time I’m going to heart that post as well
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What about Italy? If not a full deck, then Slot out! 
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I don’t know if this is what you mean, but I’ve seen comments that we were lucky, that we got battered, I’ve seen suggestions that we only won because of a goalkeeper (as if putting a lad between the sticks to catch stuff is somehow not within the spirit of the game). I saw one prick on YouTube saying morally it was a victory for PSG.
There has been a weird narrative that offside goals should be allowed if they are aesthetically pleasing. And I’d have a lot more sympathy for the suggestion Ibou should have had a red card if I wasn’t used to seeing players do that to Mo Salah four or five times a game.
So I say bollocks to that.
Here is the thing. 50-60mins of that game was played entirely on our terms. That isn’t to say we played well, or that PSG didn’t. But our lads sized up the game, and realised that the objective last night was to, at minimum, take a 0-0 back to Anfield.
I have never been less nervous watching wave after wave of opposition attacks come at Liverpool. Well actually, that’s a lie. It felt exactly as it did playing City a couple of weeks ago. You lads aren’t scoring today. That’s just the way it is.
City is a good barometer for this game, because we were saying after the Etihad that this might be a blueprint for the European games to come. And PSG felt awfully like City in how they attacked, how the commentary reacted to those attacks. Wanking themselves into a froth at the twenty step-overs, as the lad in blue skies one over the bar.
Instead of PSG having one Doku, they had about four of them, with all the tricks and little end product. They are obviously good players, but I was just watching the highlights with my lad, and the Alisson saves and it’s notable how many of their chances are pot shots from 25 yards out. Obviously a lot more dangerous than anything City created last month, but still - we’ve got the best goalie in the world having the game of his life. Take all the shots you want.
If that had been Mourinho’s Chelsea the media would have been lauding it as a perfect European away performance. Just because PSG know that their best chance of reaching the quarters is was to throw everything at us, we are not obliged to respond in kind. There is more than one way to play a game of football. Our job was to stop them scoring and then get them back to Anfield.
As a final point, I have been critical in past, especially under Klopp, that Liverpool tend to allow themselves to get dragged into whatever game of football the opposition wanted to play. It has been so refreshing this season to see this team front up the opposition, and say ‘No. You might want to play like that. But we’re playing like this.’
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I have compared it to the City game and I don’t think we were as good in this game as against City, as we had to rely on Ali too much where against City they had very few shots.
I do agree that PSG’s wide players are better than City’s, but we got forced back due to our Full backs being poor 1 v 1 with space in behind them.
The idea of relying on your keeper, having to face 27 shots and to have the game of his life, in his words, isn’t ideal.
I understand where their shots were from but you really want your players to block them.
I love how I guys don’t fold, but I don’t think our game plan was to defend as much as we did or as deep.
It was our possession that really irked me we were very poor on the ball and just coughed up the ball time after time and too easily.
When you defend too deep you normally have to rely on being perfect, have luck on your side or in this case, the best keeper.
As Slot said they had 3 or 4 good chances in the 1st half, a couple were fluffed and a couple really well saved or blocked.
So I feel we got away with it, hard fought and great commitment but not a masterclass.
In the end the result is what matters
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I’m 9 hours ahead of GMT so a 20:00 kick off is 05:00 the next day for me.
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I think PSG even with it’s dirty ownership, under Enrique, is different from the glam boys era of Messi, Mbappe and Neymar. They look like a proper footballing unit rather than just putting together glamorous expensive players.
I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that Slot set us up to do exactly what happened. Would he have said " hey guys it’s ok, let’s have them take 10 times more shots than us". He might have given a more conservative instruction but truth be told, we were pretty much dominated the first half. The 2nd half was better but the narrative did not change much, we had no answers to pretty much their forays.
We defended well of course but the truth is, we won this game on the back of Ali’s individual world class brilliance and the moment of inspiration from Harvey. A draw honestly would already have been a great result but as I say before, champions grind out results.
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Yeah but you’re 9 hours ahead, not 33.
Unless you have some kind of odd superstition that requires you to watch the game only exactly 24 hours after, or is that your cooling off period for reading the match thread?
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When the World Cup was in Japan, we had a TV set up in the staff canteen so that we could turn up early and watch the match before work.
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Yeah… but we play on Tuesday night not Wednesday :0)
Whoops. I hate getting up early on Thursdays anyway.
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Alisson equalled Courtois’ record from the Paris final with 9 saves, where we were on the other side of the fence.
We were lucky and we did get battered.
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I think another narrative is… we were swarmed as opposed to battered/destroyed/outplayed… Looking through a wider lens, we could take confidence from the way AS and his staff must have known about the whirlwind we were marching into, and set up tactics to absorb most of it. Impossible to have fended the frenzy off for the full 90mins, so what choice did we have but to face it.
If we had tried to go toe to toe from the outset, our players would have run out of gas at the 70/75 min mark, or at least well before PSG did… They would have picked us off easily after that.
The tactics IMO, were set-up to get through the first half of the tie, without them scoring more than one, and opening a wide gap… In theory, we have got through the first half of the tie, one goal to the good…!
We have seen time and again, AS adjusts his tactics at half-time in a game, lets see how he alters our approach for the second half at Anfield
COYR
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I’d agree with the above and the rest of what you wrote if we hadn’t conceded ten shots on target, of which at least five were big chances. Without an Alli in top form, it would have been a battering. Some of the off-target shots were also big chances, but were luckily for us, fluffed by their forwards. The offside goal was offside, but only for an inch or so. The situation with Ibou was a 50-50. It could easily have gone otherwise.
So, we weren’t in control at all. The very small margins went all in our favour. This wasn’t a Rafa-like tactical masterclass during which you deny anything to your opponent, while making the game boring (I could also live very well with it for such a difficult away tie). If the second game at Anfield results in similar stats, we will more probably than not go out.
I don’t expect the return game to go the same way than this one however. Slot and co. will have learnt a lot about the opposition. And we will have the Anfield crowd going for us. 
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As my son commented after the match ‘I hope we don’t become like Atletico Madrid’. 
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