By Jack Lusby, ThisIsAnfield.com
“It may have been a Champions League ultimate.”
PSG supervisor Luis Enrique summed it up in his evaluation of a tantalising tie between his facet and Liverpool within the final 16 of the Champions League.
Heading into the primary leg on the Parc des Princes either side are 13 factors clear on the high of their respective leagues and thought of champions-elect. PSG want six wins from 10 video games to ensure the title, Liverpool want seven.
It’s undoubtedly one of many hardest fixtures within the match’s first correct knockout stage and one which UEFA, presiding over the primary Champions League with 36 groups and a brand new format, may have been rubbing their arms collectively over when the draw was accomplished.
That is, in spite of everything, the aim of increasing the Champions League and introducing a brand new league section to exchange the normal group stage: extra high-profile ties, earlier within the match, and extra eyes on the product.
However for Liverpool, who stormed to the highest of the desk with seven wins from eight, drawing the reigning French champions and a facet, like themselves, on a 24-game unbeaten streak is little reward for his or her efforts over these league video games.
Not that Arne Slot and his gamers will let on, with each problem embraced in a remarkably robust season, together with resounding wins over the Spanish, German and English champions Actual Madrid, Bayer Leverkusen and Manchester Metropolis already.
They head to Paris on the again to snug victories towards Manchester Metropolis and Newcastle and with few damage issues to deal with, largely on account of cautious squad administration and the attention for element of lead bodily efficiency coach Ruben Peeters.
Liverpool boast the world’s present greatest participant in Mohamed Salah and the most effective centre-back in Virgil van Dijk, together with various others working at elite type, resembling Dominik Szoboszlai, Ryan Gravenberch, Ibrahima Konaté and Cody Gakpo.
Bookmakers place the Reds as favourites to progress to the quarter-finals, aided by the second leg being held at Anfield, which they earned by advantage of avoiding the playoffs with a top-eight end.
However the inclusion of a playoff spherical, pitting the edges who completed ninth to twenty fourth towards one another to find out the opposite eight sides to succeed in the final 16, has clouded any reward for a near-perfect league section.
It meant Liverpool and second-placed Barcelona knew they’d play one of many winners of two playoffs between PSG, Benfica, Monaco and Brest, the edges who completed fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and 18th respectively.
Drawn towards home opposition, PSG battered Brest 10-0 over two legs to succeed in the final 16 and make a mockery of their league inserting after going through Arsenal, Atlético Madrid, Bayern Munich and Manchester Metropolis amongst their eight opponents.
Talking in January, after a 2-1 win over Lille within the penultimate spherical of the league section, Slot admitted even he wasn’t certain of some great benefits of ending high of the desk, with the following knockout draw so depending on different groups’ efficiency.
“In tennis, if you find yourself No. 1 seeded you understand it’s all the time higher to face the No. 24 than the No. 8 or the No. 12, as a result of this can be a rating that’s performed for years,” he advised reporters.
“However now we’re in a brand new format the place some groups are excessive within the league desk as a result of that they had a fortunate draw or some groups are low as a result of that they had a really troublesome draw. So it’s far off to say that it’s a bonus to be one or two, we nonetheless don’t know but if that’s a bonus or not.
“You could be fortunate, you could be very unfortunate, and ending up eighth can imply that you’re perhaps fortunate. So for me, it doesn’t inform me something.
“What’s, for me, an important factor is that we’ve managed to skip a spherical, and that’s undoubtedly price a bit.”
After the postponement of the December journey to Everton and a rescheduling on account of their progress to the Carabao Cup ultimate, Liverpool didn’t even get pleasure from the advantages of skipping the playoffs, with two midweek league video games taking their place.
Both means, the actual fact stays that Aston Villa, who completed eighth, landed an objectively simpler last-16 tie, with opponents Membership Brugge ending twenty fourth within the league section and solely advancing after a defiant playoff win over Atalanta who completed ninth.
Once more, that is precisely what UEFA will cherish once they look again on the primary iteration of this new Champions League, however there may be definitely a query over whether or not that is totally honest.
Scrapping the playoffs and establishing a simple seeding for the knockout levels – first vs. sixteenth, second vs. fifteenth and so forth – would absolutely function extra justified reward for excelling within the marathon of an eight-game league section.
Whether or not that may come into consideration when the European Membership Affiliation weigh up the professionals and cons of this new format stays to be seen.
Nevertheless it may lead the likes of Liverpool to change their strategy to the league section in future, as in the end 5 wins out of eight for Villa resulted in a greater draw than their very own seven wins and one dead-rubber defeat.
(Cowl picture from IMAGO)
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