VIRTUOSO PERFORMANCE FROM PARIS MASTERS NEARED PERFECTION
LA BELLE Epoque. The beautiful era. It would appear to have made a rather spectacular return to one particular quarter of Paris, a city forever synonymous with style and elan.
Yes, yes, we know. There are distasteful questions to be asked about PSG and a summer of glutinous excess.
Those snide asides and justifiable jibes about global politics outweighing any pretence of Financial Fair Play, they won’t just be forgotten.
But on a night like this it’s hard not to be lost in admiration for the paradigmshifting brilliance of a team worth every euro invested by their Qatari owners.
Of course, the scale of the defeat will hurt the pride of Celtic supporters who had dared to dream of a glory, glory night to add to the collection.
But there are times when even the most one-eyed fanatic has to stand and applaud the better team. And there may be few better on the entire planet than the side who stormed Celtic Park with such insouciance last night.
PSG were very nearly perfect, playing with a confidence and daring that had the game won by half-time.
It was their supporters indulging in victory anthems by time up, standing to sing the praises of a team who play with an almost musical fluency.
Any side carrying their talent and ambition will always seek to drown out the war cries of defiant opponents with something altogether more harmonious.
They have already come to resemble a symphony orchestra with a jazz twist, their key players doing as much with the grace notes — the pause, the breath, the stuff that defies notation on staff paper — as anything rehearsed as an ensemble.
Celtic’s best hopes? They could try to disrupt PSG’s tempo with a heavy-metal response, all-driving Scott Brown drum solos and clashing cymbals from his team-mates in the rhythm section.
Both sets of fans had barely recovered from a spinetingling joint rendition of You’ll
Never Walk Alone, however, when the tone for this piece was set.
The visitors did near enough whatever they fancied in wide open spaces created by their jawdropping fluency of movement, control and passing.
And the home side would spend even the least dangerous moments wondering what was coming at them next.
A Kylian Mbappe hitch-kick, half rainbow flick — you might have to start making up new terms for some of the teenager’s favourite moves — that left two hooped markers stranded was a case in point.
Mbappe’s sidestep of a lunatic pitch invader, a pitiful specimen whose insane attempt to kick the teenager prompted fury among the Celtic support, was about as close as the world’s second most expensive player came to actually being tackled. The footballer at the top of that pecking order, meanwhile, provided plenty of instant rejoinders to those who think that nobody — not Pele or Diego Maradona in their pomp — could ever be worth a few shillings short of 200 million quid.
At the moment, there is no one better than Neymar at squaring up to a defender, wrong-footing the poor sap with a subtle shift of weight… then disappearing from view, leaving behind only the echo of a sonic boom.
The Brazilian had been booed from the moment he stepped off the team coach and into the pouring rain, of course. Crimes past and all that.
Well, this was no night for standing on niceties. Standing on a few incredibly expensive toes, perhaps.
The problem, as young Anthony Ralston found out pretty quickly, is that even cementing Neymar doesn’t actually slow him down. He’s a master of riding challenges, strong enough to flatten the average middleweight. He is also resilient.
But the point about PSG, one the world may soon have to accept, is that they are so much more than just two or even three brilliant individuals.
Watching them play their way out of an apparently perfect Celtic press inside the visitors’ penalty box, one-touch passing and a mathematician’s grasp of angles making the impossible not only possible, but easy, underlined their collective quality.
Easy. That’s a word that kept cropping up time and again last night. Too easy, Celtic. Come on, Celtic, you have to make this harder for them… How? Seriously, how? Not since Barca in their absolute pomp, playing Manchester United off the park in a Champions League Final, can there have been a team boasting this much skill in every department.
Dani Alves, the ‘other’ signing made this summer, has been one of the best footballers — not defenders, not full-backs, but in any position — on earth for the past decade, for goodness’ sake.
Unai Emery singling out Adrien Rabiot for special mention on the eve of this tie, meanwhile, made sense within about 15 seconds of kick-off.
The midfielder is everything you would ask for in a modern player. So controlled, so at ease launching an attack or breaking up fleeting Celtic counters, he was involved in everything PSG did.
And, make no mistake, a lot of what they did was without the ball.
It’s not that they made a hundred tackles. They didn’t need to. Through application of pressure, they merely made interception after interception.
Sure, they got a major slice of luck with the opener; Thiago Motta appeared to have fouled Scott Sinclair in the middle of the park, only for referee Daniele Orsato to wave on.
But Rabiot’s pass to Neymar was perfect, putting him in on the wrong side of Ralston. And then the No 10 just did what comes naturally.
Mbappe making it 2-0 with just over 10 minutes of the first half remaining was no more than the away team deserved for the overall domination and, if some in the Celtic camp may have complained about the penalty that handed PSG their third soon after, you have to admit that the scoreline hardly flattered them.
There may even have been a hint of relief that the visitors could only add a couple to their tally before time-up, Mikael Lustig’s own goal followed by a stunning Edinson Cavani diving header.
In front of a watching world, it could have been much worse.
Even without running up a Barca-esque score, PSG had laid down a marker to the rest of Europe.
A beautiful era of Parisian swagger in the Champions League may well be upon us.
PSG have already come to resemble a symphony orchestra with a jazz twist