Arne Slot fears ‘really bad’ Ekitiké injury and laments missed Liverpool chances

Arne Slot once again lamented Liver­pool’s wastefulness in front of goal after they were knocked out of the Champions League by Paris Saint-Germain and suffered the added blow of losing Hugo Ekitiké to a potentially serious injury.

Liverpool produced a vastly improved second-leg display against the European champions but exited at the quarter-final stage after a 4-0 aggregate defeat. Ousmane Dembélé scored twice late on to extinguish Anfield’s hope of another European comeback.

Slot said: “I have to give a lot of credit to the players for how hard they worked and to the fans for helping us execute our gameplan by always getting behind us. Unfortunately it was another example of us not being able to score from one of the many chances we had.

“We are very disappointed because there were parts of the second half where you could feel, ‘If we could just score now, this could become a very special night.’ But the future looks very bright for this team, for this club. We have showed we can compete with the champions of Europe in our stadium. To be the dominant team, not many teams can be dominant against PSG and create as many chances as we did. Creating chances is one thing though, scoring is another.”

Ekitiké was taken off on a stretcher with a suspected achilles injury after going down in the 27th minute under no pressure from a PSG player.

“It looks really bad but we don’t know how bad yet,” said Slot. “We all see the video and the clips, it doesn’t look good. For only 88 minutes until tonight we have played with Florian [Wirtz], Alex [Alexander Isak] and Hugo, and we added about 27 to that tonight. I would be surprised if we add any more minutes to that this season. The good thing is, Alex is back.

“I think probably last week we had too much luck and we ran out of luck today,” said Slot. “If a pen is given, usually VAR tells you, ‘I see contact and I support the on-field decision.’ I wasn’t surprised that this went against us, it’s happened so often this season, but that wasn’t the story of the game.”