Six points in one week, six points in extra time, that is what we call at the same time the signature, the strength of character or the famous “resilience” requested by Luis Enrique, the day before Lyon-PSG. After Nice, Paris pulled off another comeback, heads upside down but hearts up, over the head of João Neves (90+5), recovering his lead in the final minute and as the international break bell rang.
Despite winning, PSG entered a difficult period of its season, where the outcome of every match became uncertain, even when leading, no longer dominating the subject as before. This sluggishness arose because Paris had too many injured players, too many players in key positions – restart, finishing, first press – and the substitutes remained regular players. Lucas Hernandez and Kang-In Lee, who are in their 100th game under the Paris uniform, for example, do not have that little extra that could allow them to establish themselves permanently in a team at the level of European champions.
In the absence of its main creative forces – Désiré Doué, Ousmane Dembélé, Achraf Hakimi and Nuno Mendes – PSG again experienced all the difficulties in the world of producing a game. We’ll have to get used to it without all four of them still being out for a long time. Without them, passing circuits, mobility and inspiration when approaching the opponent’s box diminish like light when night falls.
There is only one solution still visible in Lyon: Vitinha, his long game, his excellent field and space modeling and his pressing in the fatal zone. Thanks to two balls, PSG took the lead in the match, first with Warren Zaire-Emery, a one-night replacement for Hakimi and who understood his role in the same way by scoring an irresistible goal by the Moroccan, who recently scored twice in Brest (0-3), then with Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, alone against the goalkeeper. Vitinha and almost everything, except the usual aggressiveness of the Georgia players and the appeal behind the defense by Fabian Ruiz, were almost never used.
A plea for review
But Paris, at the moment (which has been stretched since the return of the truce against Strasbourg with a score of 3-3), is not only “copying” Barca’s game, but also defending like the Catalan team. That means very bad, with no understanding of where to put the cursor on high defense, no security in depth. Poor alignment makes the equalizer lose double.
Except, for the first time, concentration, Luis Enrique’s men surrendered like at Lorient a few minutes after the opening. In the second set, there was no longer any doubt, with Illia Zabarnyi forgetting an extra step and Maitland-Niles hitting a brilliant lob on Lucas Chevalier, too forward when asked, for which his coach shared the blame.
When PSG’s best fireworks disappear, we forget that Dembele, Doué and others offer a much more solid team foundation. Basically, they are lacking in the front but also in the back or more precisely in pressing for the opponent’s recovery.
With “real” PSG, there are so many avoidable mistakes in these matches that sometimes they are not well controlled or go unnoticed when no one announces them. The fragility of the body also attracts men who lack self-confidence, forgetting themselves in simple phases – placement, variety in the game, raising.
