'There's no other stopper in world football as gifted'

BBC News

07-03-2025

When Plato theorised about his world of Forms many centuries before Christ, he wasn't to know his weighty philosophical musings would one day be exhumed in an email newsletter to describe a silly little football match.But here I am, hoping my secondary school philosophy teacher will one day read this and know I actually was listening, struggling to think of a better way to describe Liverpool's 1-0 victory over Paris St-Germain. The only way I can is to understand it as a smash-and-grab of such Platonic perfection that it belongs among the great thinker's higher realm of Ideals.Plato posited all that we see on Earth today is merely an imperfect copy of that which exists in its true form, its perfect form, somewhere beyond the physical. But if he were alive today and signed up to whichever Greek subscription channel broadcasts the Champions League, he will have seen a goalkeeping performance to make him consider tearing up his papyrus scroll.To pull off such a footballing heist requires magnificence from the man between the sticks - and Alisson duly delivered for his side in the French capital."It was probably the performance of my life," he said after the game, before being hailed as "the best in the world" by Liverpool's late goalscoring hero Harvey Elliott.On Wednesday's evidence, it's impossible to disagree with the youngster. Alisson has only won one Yashin Trophy - the annual award given out since 2019 to the best goalkeeper on the planet - but for my money, there's no other stopper in world football as gifted with both hands and feet.Sign up for the Football Extra newsletterThe latter were rarely used at the Parc des Prince though, this was a performance that needed hands alone - and multiple pairs, ideally. Alisson made nine saves throughout the contest, the most a Liverpool goalkeeper has made in a single game logged by data site Stathead for at least a decade. Those chances were of decent standard too, Les Parisiens' 27 total shots worthy of a combined 1.6 expected goals during 90 minutes of near-complete dominance. Liverpool had just 30% possession and took only two shots - both season-low tallies by a distance.To take the conversation to even nerdier heights, we can use Stathead's post-shot expected goals metric to illustrate the quality of PSG's shots on target during the contest. Where xG values the chance at the point of the shot being taken, PSxG shows how likely a shot is to go in after it has been kicked based on where it goes on goal. A powerful shot low to the corner has a high post-shot xG, while a weak shot at the keeper has a low one and a shot off target would return 0.By this metric, the stats say Alisson's acrobatics actually prevented 2.3 goals, the most-influential goalkeeping performance of the last decade in which Liverpool have kept a clean sheet, according to Stathead's logs.For all the Brazilian keeper's brilliance, the chips still need to fall your way to win a game in the manner Liverpool managed. All supporters, myself included, can find it tough to acknowledge luck's role in victory, as if in doing so it makes the final result less valid.However Reds boss Arne Slot had no hesitation pointing out his side were smiled upon by the footballing gods, admitting: "Had we got a draw, we would still have been the lucky ones. They were much the better team today."With the tie poised deliciously ahead of next week's return leg at Anfield, Slot will know that big improvements are needed to keep their course to the quarter-finals steady.For now though, Liverpool can savour a famous European victory. On nights like this, when luck and skill collide, even Plato would admit that the shadows on the cave wall aren't bad to look at after all.