Alisson Becker poses for a photo with the PlayStation player of the match award after his incredible performance in Liverpool's 1-0 win at Paris Saint-Germain
Alisson Becker poses for a photo with the PlayStation player of the match award after his incredible performance in Liverpool's 1-0 win at Paris Saint-Germain
Just 47 seconds separated Harvey Elliott's entrance and the moment when he dispatched the only goal of the game here against Paris Saint-Germain. The Liverpool midfielder was brought on to help stem the flow of the PSG onslaught, introduced merely to add an ounce of composure to a team who had been without it all night.
Instead, less than a minute into his cameo, Elliott was clinically dispatching past Gianluigi Donnarumma with his first touch and giving the visiting Reds a first-leg lead they simply did not deserve.
PSG dominated for large swathes and had Alisson Becker not been in inspired form - the sort that has his supporters champion him as the world's best - then the Ligue 1 leaders would be heading to Merseyside with the sort of lead that might have proven beyond even Liverpool at Anfield in the Champions League.
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"Probably [the best performance] of my life I think!" was how Alisson himself candidly described it. "So far, hopefully. The manager was telling us how hard it would be to play against PSG, how good they are with the ball, we had to be ready to suffer, so when you see the clips as well you know what is coming, so much quality."
But perhaps, for all the stunning saves and vital interventions from Alisson himself, it was the inability of Donnarumma down the other end to keep out a rare Reds shot that really hammered home just how good the Brazil international is.
Donnarumma had next to nothing to do all night but was still powerless to stop Elliott's late strike, which was helped into his path by fellow substitute Darwin Nunez.
It would be easy to praise Arne Slot for the substitutions that changed not only the course of the game but tie itself, particularly when it took one sub less than 60 seconds to do it via an assist from another. It would be even simpler to give full credit to the match-winner Elliott, whose first season under his new boss has not quite gone to plan as of yet.
But it was Alisson whose world-class status was truly justified here and the No.1 was the toast of the travelling fans at full-time as they belted out his name after keeping his 22nd clean sheet in Europe for the Reds. That's now more than any other goalkeeper in this competition and never was one harder earned.