PSG are undone by frailty at the back
WHEN Pep Guardiola said before this game that Paris SaintGermain’s great Brazilian Neymar was almost impossible to contain, his words did not address an equally important truth. The French champions do not always defend well themselves.
The evidence had been there in particular in PSG’s last-16 home leg against Barcelona.
Mauricio Pochettino’s team carried a 4-1 lead into that game after a stunning first-leg effort in Spain but during a one- sided half at the Parc des Princes, Barcelona chances arrived with the frequency of rain in the Paris springtime.
PSG were awful at the back and could have lost the game — and feasibly the tie. They didn’t but they could have and when it was put to Guardiola before this game that the French team carried a clear weakness, his suggestion that a large first-leg lead had merely led to complacency that night was fooling nobody.
Quite simply, what we saw against Barcelona — what Guardiola will have scrutinised with optimism in recent days — returned to haunt the French team here.
When City found something of their real selves in the second half, PSG crumbled, losing shape, composure, unity and discipline. By the end Pochettino’s team were a man short and fortunate only be a goal behind.
What a win for City. What a turnaround. What opportunity now awaits Guardiola and his team in next Tuesday’s second leg. This tie is not over. PSG are the kind of team who can hit a hot streak in the middle of a game and rattle off quick goals, a little like how Liverpool have done in recent seasons.
They could score two or three goals at the Etihad Stadium, just like they could have in the first half last night.
Equally, it is hard for a team to be wholly confident that things will end well when they know just how compliant and vulnerable they can be at the other end of the pitch.
The two goals conceded on this occasion could hardly have been worse. The first, a cross that drifted in at the far post, was a horror for goalkeeper Keylor Navas. The second flew straight through the defensive wall.
By the end, PSG’s composure had been lost to such a degree that the night almost ended with a comical own goal.
It would have been fitting and Pochettino will not have been hugely surprised. This is the squad he inherited and this was their fifth home defeat since the last week of February. Things like that don’t happen by accident.
For City and Guardiola, there will be no need for a team talk ahead of the second leg. The detail of what is required was all played out in Paris.
For half a game, City were not themselves. Guardiola’s plan appeared to be to try to contain Pochettino’s team but it did not work.
The Premier League championselect created hardly a chance while the nine shots taken at the City goal was the most by anyone in any competition against them this season.
So for the second period something else was needed. City simply could not allow the game to carry on like that and the switch in attitude and tactics that followed was clear.
City turned this game around by playing like they do in England. With aggression, with courage and with a commitment to dominate possession and territory.
Guardiola had said beforehand that it was impossible to win without the ball and as soon as his team remembered this they were able to flip the tie on its head.
PSG are a very good side but they are not complete and how frustrating that is for football purists. The front three of Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and Angel di Maria were superb in a first period that PSG were allowed to dominate.
If they were afforded a more reliable base on which to apply their gloss, PSG would probably win just about everything they touched.
Ultimately they paid for a failure to convert a handful of half chances while leading 1-0 as much as for what happened later in the game. PSG had City in a stranglehold for 15 first-half minutes or so and could have taken the tie away from them at that time.
On reflection, that was a critical period. Only a goal down at halftime, Guardiola was able to free up his players a little. His full backs were able to forage up field as they do in the Premier League. Kyle Walker, in particular, was terrific thereafter.
More of this from City at the Etihad Stadium next week and they will be through to their first Champions League final.
Guardiola’s team really just need to be themselves. The chances are that PSG will be. In good ways and in bad.