Watch the world (and PSG softly implode in it)
It was again a night of Paris St-Germain unintended but always self-indulgent drama.
Bayern Munich are the superpower and PSG are the wannabe. It is complicated to pick apart yet another underwhelming performance by the princes of France in their Paris parc. So bombastic, so supposedly good, so full of promise and then just… flatness. Emptiness. Substance-less. A tale as new and as old as time. The whole PSG experience is still so recent, so young, so brief, such a blip in time and yet is already a Champions League tradition. The last ten years haven’t been anything if not a constant pity party for a team with the unnegotiable, explicit aim to win it, the big one. The trophy with those ear-shaped handles. Another year, however, is gonna pass without that materializing itself. At least that’s how it seems, having been brushed aside, not with force and dominance either but just with enough knowhow, collective football ability displayed by a Bayern team that was far from brilliant but just has what it takes to take themselves home with a win.
That’s probably one of the most frustrating aspects, once again, of how it all just got away from PSG. They rampaged with as much venom and power as they could down the stretch, as Kylian Mbappe came on the field with the express intent to salvage this, to recapture a levelled scoreboard (or even win it). But it was precisely because the exuberant Portuguese left-back Nuno Mendes was not level with Bayern’s last defender that the goal that was believed to draw the match at 1-1 was just that, an illusion, a fleeting impression. It was disallowed. Just like this team, in this philosophical, spiritual sense seems to get disallowed by the untamable Champions League.
The start of the game, as the whole first half, was like any start to a game of these rounds of this aristocratic competition. The eternal chase of royal-dom from PSG, from the Qatar Emir (present at the directors box; with his sights set also on acquiring Manchester United in this strange football world of grotesque ruling-class decadence) and Nasser Al-Khelaifi, from this forever materially imperfect collection of stars. This time, with Mbappe starting the affair on the bench, they had to make do with only Messi and Neymar. It is not easy to cope in such precarity. But what was interesting about the hosts’ disposition was this antagonistic kind of 4-4-2 tactical shape, weirdly fitting, never seeming the pieces to be fully optimized. Which maybe was because, like PSG almost always have to do in these instances, their coach Christophe Galtier had chosen first and foremost to not let Bayern cut through them. The Parisians boys felt denaturalized because this is not what they do. In France no one has quality to match theirs, yet they were playing this Champions League tie right after consecutive sucker punches in Marseille and in Monaco in the last week. The sense of them not wanting to get touched up by Bayern was something inevitable when observing the action. Narrow, bunkered down through the middle, it had to become a grind of a match if wasn’t to become a rout of PSG.
The dynamic was interestingly enthralling, though, even if it was all to be an exercise in caution, because for as much as Bayern are the more fine-tuned of the two sets of players, PSG have unrivalled artillery. Nothing matches the otherworldly ability, still in 2023, of Messi, Neymar or Mbappe. That threat is worth the price admission, even if this all might soon end, or drastically change its metaphorical shape, without a PSG Champions League title and any combination of them leaving the French capital. Which was a fitting, ironic setting for what it felt that PSG was attempting to be: an adaptation, a remix, a re-instrumentation of the World Cup-winning Argentina team. A strike partnership ahead of two flat lines of four, whose midfield composition here was, just like Argentina’s, unconventional, with only one sort of winger and the three predominantly central midfielders. Marco Verrati in that Enzo Fernandez role, Danilo playing the Rodrigo De Paul notes and Warren Zaïre-Emery the likeness of Alexis Mac Allister. Sort of. All of this sort of. And maybe it is that this PSG display would’ve been plenty and more to win the World Cup. Juxtaposed to them, however, was not a national team. It was Julian Nagelsmann’s Bayern Munich. A team in it’s on “ebbs and flows” kind of reality, of being perpetually slightly dissatisfied, because just like PSG, nothing below winning the Champions League trophy at the end of the season (or at least edging as close as possible to winning it) is enough.
But what they did today, was enough. Their back-three, their guiding light in midfield that is Joshua Kimmich, their flamboyant new wingback (João Cancelo, you might’ve heard of him), their siren-like intermittent wingers, Thomas Muller as their ageless Swiss army knife up front, Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting (never not wild and amazing that this is a real thing in today’s day) as the spearhead against his former team, and a sense of coral understanding that always felt like it kept them ahead of things in PSG’s jungle. Barring an electric, exciting, sensational burst forward from Neymar into wide-open space, they repelled basically all of Galtier’s group dim attempts to turn them around. It was a bummer, from the sense of spectacle perspective, that Neymar Júnior could not get going after that one run. Like almost any defending of a Neymar run that has gotten a jump start on you, Benjamin Pavard put an end to the sequence through the spirit of that famous catchphrase of The Thing: “It’s clobberin’ time!”. A couple of plays later the Brazilian would retaliate to that, to what was not even deemed a foul by Michael Oliver. Inevitably it all kind of continued devolving in to this general petulance, not even from Neymar most particularly, but by the occasion on the whole. And PSG’S inability to push things forward.
Because it all came back to that, once and over again. It was not just that Messi and Neymar were not their most god-like most-inspired selves, it’s that it all constantly short-circuited inside this attempt of a chess match with the Bavarians. Nagelsmann’s side would control, would feel like they were being overly static, overly positional, overly cagey, but it was part of the purpose, of slowing things to a speed that would not get out of hand. And when PSG would try to respond, to move the game in the opposite direction, things just got stuck, passes would get lost into nowhere, into Bayern legs. Because Verratti is as awesome as always, for the most part, but nothing in the whole of their system was polished enough to crack Bayern with any sort of consistency. Zaïre-Emery didn’t feel like that final product of a game-changer, as is only logical. Danilo couldn’t finish stringing the ball progress with what Verratti would feed him; Carlos Soler got washed away with the tide also. And the two stars, as mentioned, were not on it to the desired levels.
What PSG did best on this night was defend. Which in itself, for what is European football’s ultimate project of grandeur, of pomp and circumstance, is just not enough to leave the event satisfied. Sure, given their ever-present, never-going-away structural problems, a nil-one deficit was not that bad of a result. It’s workable, it’s salvageable. If it would’ve stood, that Mbappe equalizer would been better. Like with everything they do, and even beyond the days of catastrophe, of accentuated, brutal ridicule, it’s these days of coming up just short, of sadly dying on the shores of quasi-greatness, that taste the most bitter. It may not hurt quite as violently like what happened in 2017, or 2019, or 2022, but the sense of frustration cuts deep.
Within the folklore, of what should be but isn’t quite, something particularly fascinating about everything that was happening was how good a game Sergio Ramos had. Again, what they did best was deflect Bayern up until, and after, Kingsley Coman’s fatidic goal. Donnaruma, the box-office goalkeeper, such a towering, imperious figure, getting caught with a shot too low, too rapid to stop before it became a goal. Even their overall impeccable defensive efforts came undone. But still, Sergio Ramos, as this magnetic, Black Hawk-like chief-in-command, exuding coolness from his Andalusian verveful figure, his serial Champions League winner status, was both the ultimate sign of PSG decadence and the puzzling comeback story of a guy that seemed completely finished for football of this level just a few months ago. But neither him, nor the Mbappe shot adrenaline (no legal shots were getting past Yann Sommer), were quite enough to avoid getting burned this time. Let’s see if there is Aloe Vera cream to be found at the Allianz Arena or if they will again be left biting the dust, licking their wounds.