Reds treble hopes dashed as PSG triumph in shootout

PSG won 4-1 on penalties after a 1-1 draw on aggregate

- MIGUEL DELANEY

A treble evaporates for Liverpool, and a double may yet go with it. This penalty shootout defeat to Paris Saint-Germain after a 10 loss didn’t just cost them a place in the Champions League quarter-final, but also a series of defenders for Sunday’s Carabao Cup final against Newcastle. Ibrahima Konate and Trent Alexander-Arnold are now in doubt, in developments that may end up the most significant of the night.

Liverpool have to quickly pick themselves up, after a deflating elimination that currently feels like the first time they are faltering under Arne Slot.

Against such talk of trebles and doubles, PSG showed an impressively singular mindset. They radiated manager Luis Enrique’s belief that they would win and turn this around, with huge slices of luck only bolstering their belief rather than weakening it.

That was needed, because so much of this outcome went against history and expectation. Liverpool lost a shootout in the European Cup and Champions League for the first time, despite the club having won them in even tenser situations. It is also the first time they have been knocked out at Anfield, having won the first leg.

PSG meanwhile came through, from a situation that is commonly held up as a test of nerve. That certainly goes against the club’s recent history. Maybe that’s why they needed Enrique’s certainty, above all else, more than Lionel Messi or Neymar.

It might genuinely be a true threshold moment for the Qatari sportswashing project, their young team coming through where more glamorous and wealthy predecessors failed.

There is now a narrative richness to the likelihood that they will face Unai Emery’s Aston Villa in the quarter-finals, since he was the manager at the helm for that notorious 6-1 defeat to Enrique’s Barcelona.