Arne Slot has said a rematch with Paris Saint-Germain was inevitable for Liverpool after reaching the Champions League’s latter stages.
Liverpool progressed to theChampions League quarter-finals with a 4-0 win over Galatasaray on Wednesday night. The Reds recovered from a first-leg defeat in Turkey to set up a showdown with holders PSG in the last eight.
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It’s a rematch of last season’s last-16 tie, when Slot’s side lost to the French champions on penalties. PSG went on to win the Champions League for the first time.
Slot is anticipating another epic encounter with the Parisians, admitting Liverpool always expected to meet last season’s conquerors again.
“If you go to the latter stages of the Champions League, you know one thing for sure: that you’re going to face Paris Saint-Germain because it is an incredible team. We’ve experienced that last season when we faced them,” Slot said at hispost-match press conference.
“Away from home, a very, very difficult game and here at Anfield… I said tonight we played a perfect game and here at Anfield we played also a fantastic game [against PSG]. I’ve said a lot of times how great of a match that was, the best game I’ve managed in my career – maybe not in the result, but how football should be played. Both teams just playing football, just wanting to enjoy the fans, to entertain the fans.
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“We were the only team that brought them to extra-time, the only team that brought them to penalties, but that team has shown this season that they haven’t dropped a level.
“We showed tonight that we can still perform at the level we were performing [at] for large parts of last season, so it gives me, us, a lot of confidence that we have this performance.
“It’s not the first one this season, we’ve had more of them – especially in Europe – and we have to try to find the consistency, although I can already disappoint people: this performance is impossible to copy one more time because 5.02xG on a Champions League night with conceding 0.18, I think, that is not going to be easy to copy one more time.”
When is Liverpool vs Paris Saint-Germain?
The first leg will take place at Parc des Princes on Wednesday April 8, with the return meeting at Anfield set for Tuesday April 14. Both games will kick off at 8pm BST.
