Champions League quarterfinals: PSG-Liverpool and Real Madrid-Bayern Munich are the marquee matches
Football at its very best. That was Arne Slot's memory of Liverpool’s richly entertaining meeting with Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League last season. OK, Liverpool ultimately went out, beaten at Anfield in a round-of-16 penalty shootout by the team that would go on to win the competition for the first time, but Slot loved the way his side played and still maintains it was “the best game I’ve managed in my career.
” They meet again almost 12 months on, with Liverpool — and Slot — in a very different place. Indeed, the Dutch coach appears to be fighting for his job heading into the upcoming quarterfinal doubleheader with the European champions that starts with the first leg in Paris on Wednesday. A 4-0 loss at Manchester City in the FA Cup on Saturday was Liverpool's latest poor result of a season that initially began with so much hope after the club's record summer splurge of $570 million on new players on the back of cruising to the Premier League title.
With the Reds having long given up hope of retaining their league title, the Champions League is their only remaining chance of a trophy. On current form, that looks unlikely. While Liverpool has lost four of its last seven games in all competitions in a run of results that has piled the pressure on Slot, PSG is on a four-match winning run that contains back-to-back victories over Chelsea in the Champions League's round of 16 (5-2 and 3-0).
Only one team has retained the Champions League since the turn of the century — Real Madrid won it for three straight years from 2016 — but PSG looks in good shape to do so. Slot and Liverpool might just be happy to get out of the Parc des Princes with a fighting chance of advancing going into the second leg at Anfield. There are three other quarterfinal matchups: Real Madrid vs.
Bayern Munich, Barcelona vs. Atletico Madrid, and Sporting Lisbon vs. Arsenal.
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