Now it is Unai Emery who needs the Remontada. As he knows from bitter experience, Paris Saint-Germain have lost leads in European second legs before, and bigger ones than this. But if Aston Villa’s damage-limitation exercise looked positively inspired for the four, heady minutes when they led and was on the brink of being a qualified success, their finest run in Europe for more than four decades may have been brought to a halt when Nuno Mendes supplied the coup de grace for PSG. After Sergi Roberto’s sixth for Barcelona against Emery’s PSG in 2017, the Spaniard can testify to the difference injury-time goals make.
Eight years on, he tried to sound bullish about Mendes’ goal. “It’s not changing a lot. At 2-1 we were thinking for the next match playing to win at 3-1 it’s still the same, we need to win the next match – [but] not just [by] one goal but two,” he said. But Villa have a colossal task to overturn a deficit next week. Beaten by the youthful brio of Desire Doue and the idiosyncratic virtuosity of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, any comeback would have to come at the expense of a PSG side staking their claim to be Europe’s finest. “We try to make history in Paris,” said Luis Enrique. “It is an ambitious goal but it is a motivation.”
