{"id":399121,"date":"2026-04-15T04:28:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T04:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/399121\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T04:28:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T04:28:07","slug":"slot-sack-inevitable-but-liverpool-boss-may-be-joined-by-someone-else-after-psg-preposterousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/399121\/","title":{"rendered":"Slot sack inevitable – but Liverpool boss may be joined by someone else after PSG preposterousness"},"content":{"rendered":"

As an NAC Breda teammate of Pierre van Hooijdonk in 2005, Arne Slot might well have traded thoughts on the art of management with his compatriot; they seem apt two decades later.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople say we became champions, but so what?\u201d Van Hooijdonk once said of his bitter Nottingham Forest exit<\/a>. \u201cIf you were to change all the managers in the league for cats, at the end of the season there will still be one champion and three will get relegated.\u201d<\/p>\n

It springs to mind in an evaluation of a Champions League knockout tie in which Liverpool could hardly have put in two more disparate performances for precisely the same result.<\/p>\n

Their passivity in Paris<\/a> had the same effect as their ardour at Anfield, at least in a hell-for-leather, kitchen sink-adjacent, nothing-to-lose second half.<\/p>\n

Both games \u2013 both tactical plans \u2013 ended in a 2-0 defeat and some difficult, chastening lessons taught by the reigning European champions. Three shots in the first leg produced as many Liverpool goals as 21 in the second. The sheer quality of PSG rendered the opposition managerial approach immaterial.<\/p>\n

Except the first leg informs the second, and Liverpool lost this tie last week<\/a>. Their attacking endeavour after half time represented a marked improvement but playing fairly well for a quarter of a two-legged knockout fixture will rarely if ever be good enough to advance at this stage.<\/p>\n

And while Slot will cling to that fourth set of 45 minutes both privately and publicly as a means of deflecting criticism, it is worth pointing out that PSG scored twice in that period and Liverpool, despite the onus being on them to chase, failed to do so at all.<\/p>\n

He claimed after the game that Liverpool \u201cshowed we can compete with the champions of Europe\u201d after being held at arm\u2019s length, patted on the head and thwacked in the face twice by Ousmane Dembele. There was more energy and more effort but that almost makes an eventual two-goal defeat at home even more damning than if the Reds had simply surrendered.<\/p>\n

Liverpool\u00a0tried\u00a0this time and were still not close to the standard required.<\/p>\n

So much of that still falls on Slot. If the plan was to drag PSG to a goalless first half before taking the game to them in the second, why waste Alexander Isak\u2019s pre-planned 45 minutes and five meaningless touches on the initial part? Why go all-out attack only after removing British football\u2019s most expensive ever attacker?<\/p>\n

Were Mo Salah nor Rio Ngumoha really not worth starting after impressing against Fulham?<\/a><\/p>\n

And why, on what was supposed to be another magical night at Anfield, was the disappearance of an entirely uneventful hour the closest thing to sorcery on Merseyside.<\/p>\n

It could be argued that the tie might have turned soon after that with the award and eventual overturn of a Liverpool penalty, when Alexis Mac Allister collapsed under the vague weight of the concept of Willian Pacho.<\/p>\n

Maurizio Mariani pointed to the spot as Mark Clattenburg debuted the referee expert\u2019s curse as a backing track to what quickly unfolded.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can class this as a clumsy challenge by the PSG defender,\u201d he said. \u201cHe does catch Mac Allister\u2019s foot. Therefore, because there is a contact, VAR will accept the referee\u2019s decision of a penalty kick. I don\u2019t expect the VAR to overturn the referee\u2019s decision, because there is a contact on the foot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost immediately after confirmation from lead commentator Jon Champion that there was \u201cno suggestion from our position of VAR having any other involvement\u201d came Mariani\u2019s trip to the pitch-side monitor and U-turn after a quick enough check.<\/p>\n

The curious thing is that Clattenburg wasn\u2019t even really wrong: he acknowledged that \u201cpeople will say it\u2019s soft\u201d but the \u201ccontact\u201d meant that once a penalty was given, it ought to have been upheld. There was no clear and obvious error, no need for VAR to intervene.<\/p>\n

As Clattenburg said: \u201cOnce the on-field decision was penalty kick, I would expect it to be given.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the paradox of an individual employed as an officiating specialist seeing his apparently factual explanation be instantly contradicted added an absurd air to what had been a thoroughly ordinary evening.<\/p>\n

It unfortunately did not spark the game into life. Ngumoha was excellent and forced one good save from the wonderful Matvey Safonov, while Milos Kerkez ought to have done far better with a back-post chance carved out by Salah on the Egyptian\u2019s final Champions League appearance for Liverpool.<\/p>\n

That effort came in between the two Dembele goals which sealed Liverpool and very possibly Slot\u2019s fate, as PSG stopped playing with their food and afforded themselves a couple of moments to indulge.<\/p>\n

By the end, the role of Liverpool manager and Amazon Prime\u2019s referee pundit was essentially the same: a cat could have done either job roughly as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As an NAC Breda teammate of Pierre van Hooijdonk in 2005, Arne Slot might well have traded thoughts…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399122,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-399121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}