As the Champions League begins, continental football’s nouveau riche are taking the stage.
PSG plays sloppy football, it didn’t connect during the galactic stage and it doesn’t connect now either, despite the fact that Luis Enrique’s hand is starting to show. The PSG play in skirmishes, provide supreme moments and this is enough to overcome Dortmund (2-0). However, his game continues to suffer from something, maybe soul, maybe oil.
PSG is neither growing nor maturing, but it has resources, and a wide range of possibilities ends up solving the ballot. There are no longer Messi or Neymar, although there are Mbappé, infallible on the penalty spot, Dembélé or an inspired Hakimi, a full-back who is as wild as a winger. The cut that enables him to score the second Parisian goal is school.
City, in theory the greatest of the greats, hesitated and trusted themselves against the Estrella Roja bridgehead, and went into the half at a disadvantage after Bukari’s goal just before the break.
The partial surprised the experts, since City, nouveau riche in the manner of PSG, does not usually get tangled up like PSG does (for some reason it is defending the title of last year), and neither are many ostentation expected from the Serbian side
(Where was the splendor of the times of Prosinecki, Mihajlovic, Pancev or Savicevic, the champion of 1991?).
Logic made its way later, already in the second half, when the Serbs dismounted (actually, there was nothing left of Prosinecki or Savicevic) and Guardiola’s team corrected the mistake. Two goals from Julián Álvarez and one more from Rodri make it 3-1.
Atlético is not a nouveau riche, but, in its day, it had moved around Europe with its chest out, chest of a newcomer to the elite, Simeone’s godson: he has played in two finals with Cholo on the bench.
What times!
Now it doesn’t shine like it did then, despite the fact that the master lines are repeated, like a mantra. In other words: a generous defensive line, with Savic at the core, a chronic lack of interest in the ball, temperance in the center of the field, the dynamism of Griezmann and the offensive pivot of Morata.
Apparently, these elements are enough.
Their game is a spider web that surrounds Lazio, the Romans are caught despite the insistence of Immobile and Luis Alberto, players of the very first category whom Lazio is too small for.
Simeone is an artist when it comes to rebuilding the project. He does it year after year, now Koke is injured, now João Félix or Yannick Carrasco leave, another spirit dedicated to the petrodollar: he has a spare for everything. This time, the replacement is Pablo Barrios, around twenty years old, who is making his Champions League debut and shouts:
-I am here!
He says this when he connects a kick from outside the area that deflects Kamada and surprises Provedel, the Lazio goalkeeper, who remains on his knees with his hands on his waist.
At the time, no one would have said that Provedel himself would correct Lazio’s drift: Atlético, who are faltering in La Liga, seem to have tied the game, and yet they lose their way in the last minute of the added, already in 94, when Provedel appears between the lines and scores the goal in the face of Simeone’s desperation: there is no respect for his water mark (1-1).
