In its purest form, the way Luis Enrique likes it, football is about control. At its most enthralling, in the knock-out stages of the Champions League, it is about chaos.
On a thrilling night in a white-hot atmosphere at Villa Park, Paris Saint-Germain team took control of this Champions League quarter-final tie with another exhibition of the fluent, elegant football that has made them serious contenders to win the competition for the first time.
Already 3-1 up from the first leg, they scored twice in the first 27 minutes — full-backs Achraf Hakimi and Nuno Mendes rounding off two typically incisive counter-attacks — to take a 5-1 aggregate lead. They were passing the ball beautifully, their midfield trio of Joao Neves, Vitinha and Fabian Ruiz establishing a level of control only the best teams can produce at this level.
And then came the chaos. Unai Emery put it down to his Aston Villa’s team refusal to accept defeat. PSG coach Luis Enrique ascribed it to a surfeit of confidence from his players as half-time approached.
Whatever it was, Villa pulled a goal back late in the opening period and after that, Luis Enrique said, “The match was crazy”.
Elite-level football very often is these days. For all the talk in some quarters of “robotic” football, overly prescriptive, low on creativity and risk, so many games at the highest level in this era — particularly in the second leg of knock-out ties in this competition — become frenetic occasions in which momentum shifts dramatically and chaos takes hold.
It has often been seen as a PSG thing, since they have been on the wrong end of some of those second-leg comebacks, including the famed Barcelona remontada in 2017 (a 6-5 aggregate win at Camp Nou thanks to goals in the 88th, 91st and 95th minutes) and a Karim Benzema-inspired Real Madrid victory in 2022. Barcelona have suffered collapses from seemingly unassailable positions, as have Manchester City, Ajax and others. It is what the Champions League knock-out stages have become. Arsenal, taking a 3-0 first-leg lead to Real Madrid, will be aware of that.
From 5-1 up on aggregate within half an hour last night, coasting towards the semi-finals, PSG were dragged back into a fight and, according to Luis Enrique, made to “suffer”. The ferocity with which Villa started the second half, scoring through John McGinn on 55 minutes and Ezri Konsa on 57 minutes, was remarkable. If Barcelona, 4-0 up from the first leg, were briefly shaken by Borussia Dortmund last night, the threat to PSG was greater and more sustained.
For ten minutes or so after Konsa reduced the aggregate deficit to 5-4, PSG were on the ropes. The atmosphere was electric and so too, for a period, was Marcus Rashford, who once terrorised PSG for Manchester United. Youri Tielemans, with a looping header, and then Marco Asensio, racing clear of the offside trap, forced Gianluigi Donnarumma into excellent saves. Konsa narrowly failed to connect properly with a Rashford free kick.
“I don’t think (PSG) has been dominated by a team in this way,” Luis Enrique said in his post-match press conference. “We suffered a lot. Every time they were sending balls into our box and that is not our game. We are a small team. Defending corners is not our favourite aspect of the game. It wasn’t a match made for us. We’re not made to defend like this.”
The question is whether, by weathering that storm against Villa, PSG showed a previously unseen strength to their game or whether they showed vulnerability. They look far stronger now than they did when they lost 2-0 to Arsenal in the league phase of the competition, but if the semi-finals are to bring a rematch — and Arsenal, albeit with a 3-0 lead, still have to get through their second leg against Real Madrid this evening — Mikel Arteta and his set-piece coach Nicolas Jover might enjoy trying to expose the weaknesses Luis Enrique mentioned.
It was striking that Luis Enrique spoke of an “excess of confidence” from his players late in the first half, saying they were “playing at a level that was not befitting of the Champions League”. Vitinha said something similar in an interview with Canal+, saying PSG had “created problems for ourselves”. Marquinhos spoke of “drops in intensity that we must not repeat in the semi-finals.” Ousmane Dembele said, “We thought we were too good. At 2-1 (on the night) we thought we had already qualified and that it was over.”
These were words full of self-reproach — perhaps surprisingly so, given the enthusiasm with which they had been celebrating a few minutes earlier. At least it shows a willingness to recognise and accept the coach’s demands. Luis Enrique said they would be stronger for the experience.
The mind went back to something Pep Guardiola once said of the need to retain composure in the Champions League. “In the bad moments you have to remain calm,” the Manchester City manager told reporters in 2018. “(Real) Madrid, Barcelona, they are taking a cup of coffee (in those difficult moments) because they know their chance is coming. That’s the big difference.”
It is something PSG have never quite mastered in previous Champions League campaigns. Even when they appeared to have cracked it in the past, they could never quite hold firm when the stakes were highest and the pressure from the opposition at its most intense.
But the difficulty about those games and those periods is that they take teams into unfamiliar and unwanted territory. So much about modern football is about playing to your strengths, but no team wants to play on their opponents’ terms.
The big test for PSG will be how they cope when the tide turns against them, as it almost certainly will at some point over the course of the semi-final. Control turns to chaos and it becomes a question of whether you can hold on. It is not their favourite part of the game, as Luis Enrique said after the Villa Park experience, but it is one that any team with Champions League-winning aspirations has to get right, all the way to the final.
(Top photo: Carl Recine/Getty Images)
