These are strange times for Liverpool Football Club, still, and until anyone specifically says otherwise, the champions of England. It is a mark of where the team is that on an oddly tension-free night in Paris there were reasons to be pleased, but also not to be pleased about being pleased.

Pleased that Liverpool’s players didn’t give up or stop trying. So that’s a tick. Pleased that they only lost 2-0 against a Paris Saint-Germain team who were able to approach this first leg carelessly, to showboat a little, to approach the scoring of a goal in the style of a temperamental high-end Parisian pastry chef, always trying to create the perfect deconstructed mille-feuille tour de vanille infinite, when all you really need is a biscuit.

And pleased at the end that rather than passively aggressively taunting the travelling fans, Dominik Szoboszlai instead walked off down the tunnel alone while his teammates wandered over in pursuit of Arne Slot, out there pointedly making nice, that lovely soft round head gleaming a little sadly under the Paris lights like a weak spring moon.

This will qualify as an improvement. The tie is still alive. Perhaps some kind of deep Anfield...