City Keep Steady to Reach New European Heights as PSG Falter
For all that these two super-rich teams have long wanted to be super-clubs, Manchester City won this game - and finally got behind the velvet rope of the Champions League semi-finals - because they played like a team that anyone should want to be. They were impressively solid in defence and sufficiently clinical in attack. It was a focus and application we haven’t seen enough from City this season, and certainly didn’t see from Paris Saint-Germain. They just looked less than the sum of the parts. Again.
There are of course mitigating circumstances to all of that that, as Manuel Pellegrini pointed out it in his victorious press conference. His difficult season could yet end with a real positive, but he was keen to point out the reasons for those difficulties.
"Playing David Silva with Sergio Aguero, with Yaya Toure, with Fernandinho - of course, the team improves immediately. But I said before the game it is very important to have our best players fit 100 per cent. We played a lot of games during this season with important players injured - we have a squad that merits us being at this stage.”
PSG, however, didn’t have some of their best players available. Before the game, they were missing two of their first-choice midfield in injured Marco Verratti and suspended Blaise Matuidi. By half-time, they were missing all of it, as Thiago Motta also had to go off. That was obviously going to affect and the loss of Verratti - as in the first leg - seemed especially crucial, given that it sapped PSG’s fluency. A team that tends to play seven key passes per game only played three.
That still should not absolve the club or Laurent Blanc of blame, though, especially since they’re not exactly in the kind of intense title race that tends to fatigue individuals and bring injuries. It exposed the fact that, for all the money they spend, PSG do still have that big problem that big money brings. They are often attempting to impose stars - and thereby a loose system - on top of a team, rather than underlaying it with a team identity that links them all together much more cohesively. It means they become too dependent on individual moments of brilliance to score in tight matches, and too dependent on specific individual players to bring a fluency where otherwise there would be none.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Angel Di Maria are clearly the former for PSG, but Verratti is clearly the latter. Without him, Blanc had no choice but to improvise, going for a 3-5-2 formation. It didn’t work. PSG got hold of the ball - with as many as 399 passes and 64.7% possession by the time they had to go back to 4-3-3 when Motta got injured - but did nothing with it. They played zero key passes up to then and, even by the 60-minute mark of a game they had to score in, the only had two shots on goal. Both of those were from direct Zlatan free-kicks.
Joe Hart met both fairly comfortably despite the power of the shots, and that also perpetuated a trend.
City might not have had to be brilliant given how flat PSG were, but they did meet every challenge they had well - Aguero’s penalty miss apart. Fernando and Fernandinho were superb in front of the backline, making three and four interceptions, respectively. Any time they were breached, Eliaquim Mangala and Nicolas Otamendi stood up impressively. The former made three key clearances at crucial moments, the latter offered five.
That was the foundation for one of City’s stars to take advantage of whatever chances came their way. Aguero missed his penalty in an otherwise fine outing, De Bruyne smashed in his long-range effort in an overall excellent performance. Even beyond his goal, he played three of City’s five key passes. He just gives them that incisiveness they’ve been missing for so much of the season.
It was an incisiveness totally missing in PSG. In the last half hour, when they really should have been subjecting City to a siege, they only had another two shots. It was so bizarrely flat, even allowing for the missing players. Instead, players on the pitch went missing. This was one of those situations when the urgency of the game should take over, but there was none of that. No last stand necessary for City. So, no first semi-final for the new PSG.
Ibrahimovic so often puts himself forward as the symbol of the team and he was exactly that after this elimination, although probably not in the way he would have liked: so much talent, so much profile, so much money involved and yet still no Champions League and still not doing much more than racking up easy domestic titles mostly against teams way below their level.
City, however, have finally moved onto a new level and they did it by keeping steady.
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