Champions League: Newcastle defeated PSG

One of the most memorable matches of the second round of the Champions League group stage was the one in which Newcastle, who had returned to the continental football elite, defeated PSG 4:1, emphasizing the inevitability of the problems that the French giant, which had undergone a radical personnel restructuring, would have to face in order to find stability and power.

With the help of this match in Group F, it would be possible to arrange a funny experiment, proving the complexity and paradox of modern football. In order for it to turn out clean, it would take people who had not seen the game at all and did not know how it ended. And their task would be to guess the style of the meeting and its result based on key statistical indicators. Well, for example, the percentage of ball possession. The reaction of the vast majority of them is not difficult to imagine. Well, if one of the teams owns the ball for almost three quarters of the playing time, then it must be assumed that they were pressing. And if she misfired, it was most likely accidental, due to the exceptional patience and luck of her opponent.

A person who answered this way would probably be terribly surprised to see the final score of the match, and most importantly, the comments about it from experts – both English and French. The thing is that they were absolutely unanimous. Someone, of course, agreed with PSG coach Luis Enrique that 4:1 was a little more than what was supposed to happen. But no one argued that Newcastle were too clearly dominant. And not in individual segments, but throughout virtually the entire hour and a half, from the starting whistle to the final one. And in statistics, by the way, these observations are also reflected. For example, in terms of the number of shots on target, the English club has a fourfold superiority – eight versus two.

This is a phenomenon that in reality can no longer be called an anomaly, because in recent years everyone who closely follows football has had to get used to the fact that possession – both of the ball and of the territory – is not always equivalent to pressure. Moreover, it often happens that it is completely useless – as in this meeting, the outcome of which for Newcastle fans was the reason to organize a grandiose and noisy celebration with overflowing emotions, songs, dances and rivers of beer. Everything is clear: the club, which once fell off the list of heroes of the English Premier League for a long time, got into the Champions League after a break that lasted as much as two decades. It fell into a terrible group, judging by the sonority of the brands collected in it. But nothing: in the first round he played away against Milan, playing with them 0:0, now he destroyed the French monster and, as the leader of the quartet, is optimistically awaiting the visit of Borussia Dortmund in the next round.

For PSG fans, the outcome of the game was a reason to grieve, but restrainedly, without much strain, although the club has never lost so badly in the group stage of the Champions League since huge Qatari money poured into it at the beginning of the last decade, and it is in the top four now below all competitors. The tone of the analytical materials devoted to the formally high-profile breakdown, for example, in L’Equipe, was also restrained.

And there is nothing surprising here. The match with Newcastle is just confirmation of what was already clear to everyone. In the summer, tired of looking for a way to finally make a European Cup breakthrough commensurate with its resources, PSG carried out another personnel restructuring, much more radical than the lion’s share of the previous ones: a new coach – Luis Enrique, a new squad – without Lionel Messi and Neymar, but with Milan Skriniar, Luca Hernandez, Ousmane Dembele, Manuel Ugarte, Gonçalo Ramos, Randal Colo-Muani and Vitinha. It usually takes a lot of time before everything “settles down” after such tectonic shifts. And the fact that PSG is not a happy exception to the rule was clear even before the English breakdown.

In the opening match of the Champions League, PSG quite confidently dealt with Borussia at home. But that meeting, in fact, rather stood out from the overall picture, in which bright colors do not yet predominate. In the French Championship, PSG have won only three out of seven meetings and are fifth, albeit only two points behind top-ranked Monaco. And various problems associated with his play constantly surfaced during the championship: either the defense was performing poorly, or for some reason Kylian Mbappe, called upon to lead his partners after the flight of Messi and Neymar, was fading into the shadows. And the loss to Newcastle highlighted another one. The defeat, in fact, grew out of one single factor – tough English pressing, mixed with amazing “physics”, which PSG had never encountered in France. It turned out that the mix created by Luis Enrique from the footballers and recruits who remained in Paris, with and without a name, was completely unprepared for such a seemingly simple strategy, and how much the coach would need to adapt to it is a tricky question. As, indeed, everyone else related to today’s PSG – a riddle of riddles.

Alexey Dospehov