There was probably enough in the final 20 minutes for Paris Saint-Germain to think that it can turn the tie around in Munich, but that really wasn’t the story of its 1–0 defeat to Bayern.
For the first hour, Bayern was implausibly dominant, and its regret will be that it didn’t get the two or three goals in that spell that might effectively have settled the tie. Ultimately, perhaps, this was a tale of two deeply flawed sides: one with an enormous gulf between its forward line and its midfield, and the other prone to collapse under pressure.
PSG, in recent years, seemed to have settled on a policy of three stars up front with three scrappers in midfield, which was at least an acknowledgement that a problem existed with regaining the ball. But Idrissa Gana Gueye and Leandro Paredes have both gone, robbing PSG of bite, and Ángel Di María has departed as well. With Fabián Ruiz and Vitinha confined to the bench, there is little to link midfield to the forward line. Not for the first time, PSG’s recruitment has made more sense from a marketing than a footballing point of view.
