AGENCIES

Last season’s beaten finalists Liverpool got their Champions League campaign off to a disastrous start in a 4-1 defeat away to Napoli on Wednesday, while Robert Lewandowski hit a hat-trick in a big 5-1 win for Barcelona on Wednesday night.

Juergen Klopp’s side were outplayed in the first half and fortunate to only go in 3-0 down at the break and the German, who won the competition with Liverpool in 2019 and led them to the final last season, said there was plenty to be fixed.

“We have to reinvent ourselves. The fun part is we have to do that in the middle of a Premier League season and a Champions League campaign,” Klopp told reporters after match.

At the Camp Nou, Lewandowski became the first player to score a Champions League hat-trick for three different clubs as the ex-Borussia Dortmund and Bayern star marked his first appearance in the competition with Barcelona in style.

The Pole now has 89 Champions League goals, three more than Karim Benzema, with only Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi ahead of him. Barca’s next game will be away to Lewandowski’s old side Bayern Munich.

Meanwhile, Bayern strolled against Inter 2-0, Tottenham Hotspur beat Marseille by identical margin, and Atletico Madrid and Ajax Amsterdam also got their campaigns underway with victories.

“To compete in the Champions League you spend hundreds of millions, for us to compete it is too much to ask,” insisted the Rangers manager, Giovanni van Bronckhorst, as the last season’s Europa League finalists’ return to the group phase of Champions League since 2010 started off with a 4-0 thrashing by the Dutch giants.

The game between Atletico and Porto at the Metropolitano Stadium in Madrid saw an incredible finish. Porto had Mehdi Taremi sent off late on before Mario Hermoso put Atletico ahead with a deflected 92nd-minute strike.

Hermoso then conceded a penalty for handball, allowing Matheus Uribe to equalise in the 96th minute, only for Antoine Griezmann to head the winner in the 11th minute of injury time as Atletico beat Porto 2-1.

Coincidently, the only other game in Champions League history to feature three goals scored in stoppage time was Porto’s home meeting with Atletico in December last year.

Elsewhere, Club Brugge edged past Bayer Leverkusen 1-0, while Sporting Lisbon scored all of their goals in the second half to hammer Eintracht Frankfurt 3-0.