Liverpool's lost season as good as over, UCL elimination vs. PSG underlines questions that remain unanswered

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If this is to be the end of Liverpool's season as a high-stakes endeavour, then it was a fitting denouement. In the space of a few minutes, Arne Slot's soon-to-be deposed champions of England suffered a potentially brutal injury blow to one of their marquee signings and saw the big moment to break open the tie slip through their grasp. A season in microcosm.

When Virgil van Dijk met a ball that had pinballed around the box off a Mohamed Salah cross, it might have been one more glorious night for the old guard. Marquinhos had other ideas. Liverpool had had their openings before and would do so after but none with the same gusto of that first half hour. If they really needed any sense that this was not their day, not their year, it came with 25 minutes left to play when VAR Marco Di Bello invited Maurizio Mariani to reassess the soft but not particularly overturnable penalty given when Willian Pacho clattered into Alexis Mac Allister.

They may have lost by the same scorelines, Ousmane Dembele's double firing Paris Saint-Germain into a third successive semifinal, but this was the right way for Liverpool to go. No hunkering down in their penalty area, the odd pressing sally doing little to discomfort the European champions. Tuesday night, there were at least moments of what might have been. At their peak in the second half, the hosts had 12 unanswered shots on the Parisian goal. Milos Kerkez couldn't quite turn a first-time effort on goal. Cody Gakpo got his angles right but Matvey Safonov read his daisy cutter in time.

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Ultimately, these were the sort of half-chances with which Dembele won the tie. If Alexander Isak or Hugo Ekitike had been on the the pitch after the interval, Liverpool's best might have delivered something to build on. Instead, it was their opponents who delivered where the game mattered most, in both boxes. Another iteration of PSG would not have defended their goal line with the gusto of Marquinhos, who let out a roar of delight when he blocked Van Dijk's shot. They would not have had just one more man back in the second half as Liverpool probed down the flanks, Salah and Rio Ngumoha beating one blue shirt only to run into another.

Salah's last European night at Anfield was another of those seasons in a microcosm. Contentiously dropped as Isak came into the side, he was still a source of real danger for PSG, clearly an attacker that can threaten the best defenses, 14 penalty box touches in less than an hour. That is nearly a quarter of Liverpool's total for the two legs. He ended a tie in which he played zero minutes in the first leg with almost 30% of Liverpool's expected assists. Salah was excellent. It's just he was not quite Mohamed Salah we knew him before this season, the man who turns all that threat into goals.

There are now just three home games before Salah waves goodbye to the club where he became a superstar. There is still the small matter of Champions League qualification for next season's side to resolve but Chelsea's sinking has made that an altogether less high-stakes mission. In all likelihood, this will be a campaign that splutters towards adequacy. Given the trying circumstances that Liverpool have been playing in this year, that is not nothing.

It just would have been preferable if 2025-26 could have offered more of an insight into the rest of this decade. This was just the second occasion in all competitions where Ekitike, Isak and Florian Wirtz were named in the starting XI. In all, the $400 million of attacking talent on which the Liverpool rebuild is to be built have shared the field for less than two hours.

That might be it for the season. It would be the logical assumption after Ekitike slid under no pressure, stretchered off the pitch with what appeared to be an Achilles injury. The 23-year-old had moments in his debut Premier League season to hint that he might be a valuable tool for France at the World Cup. Now there will be questions as to whether he will miss the tournament. That would be a cruel blow for Ekitike.

As for Liverpool, next season will start with plenty of the same questions that this did. How do the big three signings fit alongside Dominik Szoboszlai, inarguably Liverpool's best attacking player this season? Does a midfield of Mac Allister and Ryan Gravenberch have the muscle to impose itself on the best of the Premier League and Europe, particularly if they need to plug gaps when their fullbacks bomb on? Is Ibrahima Konate staying put, and if so, should it be as Virgil van Dijk's partner and eventual successor?

These background issues from last summer must now be in the foreground of Liverpool's minds, as will the future of Slot. With Salah and Andrew Robertson departing, this is now clearly the post-Jurgen Klopp age, a time to restore this club to the sort of perennial continental contention that is now PSG's. Is this task one you want to entrust to this manager? Twelve months ago, the answer was a resounding yes. It says everything for this lost season that now even that most fundamental of issues is not one that is easy to answer.