by And Merry Christmas to you too, Luis Enrique. He looked very hairy there for a while, as his Paris Saint-Germain side came within a whisker of group-stage humiliation in the only competition they ever seemed to care about. Borussia Dortmund were leading as well as Newcastle, and for all their spirit and enterprise the French champions were doing their best to push their coach towards one door of the Paris Advent calendar that you don’t want to miss. opening.
But just as the jokes were starting to write themselves, Paris was saved from the ghost of their past by the ghost of their present, and the ghost of their future. Kylian Mbappé created the equalizer for electrifying 17-year-old midfielder Warren Zaïre-Emery and, even if Milan’s late goal put Tyneside in excruciating danger in the final minutes, Luis Enrique’s side progressed record one by one. .
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A turn of distress. Sighs of relief all around. And your young, quick, transitional and exciting side, rare signs of hope at the end of a pleasantly open and often chaotic group phase.
“We are a new team: 11 new players, new team, new campus,” said Luis Enrique, who made no apologies for ordering his players to keep the ball in the closing stages when a draw was clearly enough. “I’ve been coaching teams for 12 years at a high level, and all my teams have improved over time. I think in February we will be somewhere.”
The irony is that many of the classic criticisms of Paris don’t really apply in the post-Messi, post-Neymar era. Since his arrival in the summer, Luis Enrique has perhaps generated the clearest vision of what this club should be. Not a decadent star vehicle, not a celebrity TV show, but a modern balling unit, full of youth and speed and movement and fun. They no longer defend with only eight men. In Lee Kang-in, Vitinha and Zaïre-Emery they have one of the most promising midfields in Europe: lives, mobility, cutting edge and an average age of less than 21.
When? Monday, 11am. The winner of each group is paired with the runner-up, but teams from the same qualifying group or qualifying country are kept apart.
Group winners: Arsenal, Bayern Munich, Manchester City, Real Madrid, Real Sociedad, Atlético Madrid, Borussia Dortmund, Barcelona
Second place Copenhagen, Internazionale, Napoli, PSV Eindhoven,
RB Leipzig, Lazio, Paris Saint-Germain, Porto
And for all their latent flaws, the individual errors, the occasional lack of cohesion, their apparent paralysis of defensive set pieces, Luis Enrique’s team would really be unlucky to get out here: a victim of as much and their heritage in front of the goal and diabolically tough pull as any kind of basic structural deficiency. Of course, any team with these good resources should not be satisfied with quality alone. But there are signs of life here, signs of progress, signs that their parasitic, haunted Hollywood age is giving way to something more organic and exciting.
No one expresses this new spirit better than Zaïre-Emery. Originally from Romainville in the Paris suburbs, just a few bus stops from Bondy where teammates Mbappé and Randal Kolo Muani grew up, Zaïre-Emery is one of those rare players who looks set to make it to the professional game fully formed, fully developed, with all the software downloadable. He defends as well as he attacks, and over his goal he ran this game in the second half: a service was cut off to Salih Ozcan in the Dortmund midfield, going short and long from either foot, darting into the channels with the impatience coiled all. of youth.
Meanwhile, Dortmund were wasted. Dortmund always lose. Even when winning 5-0, Dortmund manage to look lost. This is indeed a tribute to his dynamism and imagination, his determination to keep pushing and chasing lost causes and creating half chances out of nothing. And while their Bundesliga form has been patchy, something about this competition seems to bring out the animal in them. Having already qualified and playing largely to their own amusement, they ran into Paris, scoring the opening goal through Karim Adeyemi and passing over several other promising openings.
Niklas Süle, who made a miraculous clearance off the line in the first half, took the lead in the first place, which led to a truly thespian double take from Mbappé, who had rounded the goalkeeper and was preparing to to celebrate already.
Bradley Barcola and Kolo Muani also came close in the first half, while Mats Hummels missed a simple header on the stroke of half-time. By this point Newcastle were leading, and when Adeyemi headed the ball into the net after an error by Achraf Hakimi, Paris’ charge took on a kind of feverish urgency.
Good job, then, that some of the world’s hottest footballers are in Paris. It was Mbappé, a stirring and menacing presence all night, who created the opportunity, driving down the left wing past a trembling Marius Wolf and squaring the ball for Barcola, whose clever flick from 18 was saved by Zaïre-Emery. yard
There were other chances – a goal disallowed by Mbappé for the outside, a great chance for Marco Reus late on to send Paris into the Europa League. But when the smoke cleared Luis Enrique and his team had done enough: good news, if not all joy.
