Champions League: Slot tips Liverpool to bounce back against PSG

Under-fire Liverpool coach Arne Slot said his team will bounce back from their latest setback in a difficult season as they prepare for a rematch with Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League on Wednesday.

Liverpool welcome back striker Alexander Isak to the squad following injury for the quarter-final, first leg in Paris.

It comes off the back of a 4-0 hammering by Manchester City in the FA Cup at the weekend — a game in which captain Virgil van Dijk suggested that the team had given up.

“I didn’t see players giving up. But I think it’s also good for our captain that he has a strong and firm reaction after a game like that,” Slot told reporters at the Parc des Princes on Tuesday.

Slot’s team have won just one of their last five matches and are currently fifth in the Premier League, far from certain of returning to Europe’s elite club competition again next season.

That puts extra pressure on him and his side for a tie against the reigning European champions, which is a repeat of the last-16 clash a year ago which Liverpool lost on penalties at Anfield despite winning 1-0 in the first leg in France.

“We can never take a quarter-final of the Champions League for granted, let alone if you face the champions of Europe that fully deserved to win the Champions League last season, and again this season are doing very, very well,” Slot said.

“I just look at the challenge in itself, and it’s a nice one because in football it’s sometimes also nice to get a second chance, and in life in general it’s nice to get a second chance.”

Slot believes that his team can draw on the way they played for the first half-hour at the Etihad Stadium against City before they fell apart.

He also knows that the visitors probably will not get away with a repeat of what happened against PSG in Paris last season, when they survived a pounding before somehow snatching the win with a late goal.

“It’s a challenge for us to be from the first to the last second at the level we were in the first 35 minutes” against City, he said.

– Isak to feature? –

“If not, it’s going to be a really hard night again, like it was last year, where we completely deserved to lose 4-0 over here, or maybe more.

“But that’s the beauty of football. In the 85th minute, we scored a goal where I was almost like, wow, this was robbery.”

Swedish striker Isak is in the Liverpool squad for Wednesday’s game and could make his first appearance since suffering a leg fracture against Tottenham Hotspur in December.

“He finished close to a week of team training sessions now, so he can play a part, otherwise I wouldn’t take him,” said Slot.

“Since he is with us now we do think we can get a performance out of him now, but not to start so quickly.”

Slot was full of praise for Luis Enrique’s PSG, saying it was “almost impossible to be better than the team they were last season”.

“In the 100m sprint, if you run 9.8 (seconds) you cannot go to 8.6, you can maybe go to 9.75, and these are the margins we are talking about with Paris Saint-Germain.

“We are at a different stage now because we made a big transition in the summer, but we are trying to go to that 9.8 again and maybe even 9.75.”

Earlier, Liverpool’s German star Florian Wirtz, one of several marquee signings made for this season, insisted that he and his teammates still believe in Slot despite the team’s struggles.

“Of course we are believing in the manager. The team should believe in the manager because they won the league last season,” he said.

“We have had a lot of good games this season. We wanted it to be better than what it is now, but we still have things to play for.”