LIVERPOOL will be required to find a performance of the very highest order - of the celestial rather than terrestrial variety - on the green, green grass of home in a fortnight if they are to do anything other than slip disconsolately out of this season's Cup Winners' Cup.

Two catastrophic errors by the goalkeeper David James were sufficient to move the competition's defending champions to the threshold of a place in next month's Rotterdam final.

Hope always springs eternal at Anfield. It will need to after last night's performance. It is hard to believe the Merseysiders will perform with such ineptitude a second time. But, after Leroy added a third goal in the 84th minute, they will need little short of a miracle to survive now.

Although Liverpool's manager, Roy Evans, had hinted that his intention was to buck a trend and toss a measure of caution to the winds, his decision not to jettison the bemusingly inconsistent Stan Collymore was still perplexing.

To play with two forwards and attack when the natural instinct away from home is to defend was a calculated gamble, albeit one born of optimism.

Teams only half as proficient as Paris, most recently Coventry City, have found scoring at Anfield remarkably easy lately, and possibly Evans could not clear his mind of thoughts of this tie's second leg as he drew the names out of the hat.

The hundreds of empty seats bore testimony to a local loss of faith in a Paris team that has force-fed its support a diet of broken promises since Rapid Vienna were defeated in this tournament's final last May.

But Paris can play when in the mood, and Liverpool's almost embarrassing first-half hesitancy allowed them to hit a sweet and irresistible rhythm dangerously early.

Revelling in the freedom afforded them by a Liverpool backs line which lacked cohesion, Paris threatened to finish the job early. The warning signs were posted inside the opening two minutes when goalkeeper James had to drop down smartly to his left to keep out Cauet's drive.

Unfortunately for Liverpool and worryingly for England, James is fast developing a reputation for blunders of a schoolboy-kind; entirely preventable mistakes that drain away the self-belief of those about him.

Eleven minutes in he raced from his line in search of Fournier's cross from the left. He succeeded only in tapping it into the path of Cauet and, although James blocked the shot, he could not prevent the player returning the rebound to an unprotected far post where the Brazilian Leonardo finished clinically and simply.

The prospect of complete capitulation was suddenly very real, and had only Barnes and Steve McManaman not had the sense to spread and hold the play, the trickle might have become a flood.

Even so, Liverpool's football was so ordinary that a positive response seemed unlikely. They threatened only when the ball lay - at the feet of wing-back Stig Bjornebye, a deceptively creative player with an eye for a useful pass.

It was his fine cross in the 26th minute which took Liverpool to the verge of an equalising goal, Robbie Fowler reaching the ball first to knock in a header that the goalkeeper Lama held comfortably just beneath his cross-bar.

And then? Another appalling James mistake, of course. Just when the ship had been steadied, the hapless one was at it again.

Two minutes before the interval, Leroy's cross slipped through his wildly flapping hands. Loko knocked it across to his right and although Cauet's shot was clipped rather than struck with force, it rolled home off the inside of a post.

As his team-mates scowled, James held his head in his hands. No doubt compounding his misery was the sight of far-distant Lama catching shots and crosses like a village green boundary fielder.