Chelsea started losing this game<\/a>. And it is a moment that captured the reasons why they were cuffed aside in Paris: a combination of managerial naivety, twinned with the razor edge of Paris Saint\u2011Germain\u2019s front six, in particular the brilliantly moreish Khvicha Kvaratskhelia.<\/p>\nChelsea had played well for 74 minutes at the Parc des Princes. They came from behind twice, exploited space behind the flying full\u2011backs of PSG. And for a while this was just a really good, open game, the midfield an endless full-contact pirouette in search of space.<\/p>\n
Elite football may be a systems\u2011slog. It may at times resemble a 22-man competitive knitting festival. But this didn\u2019t feel like that. It was peppy, brisk and evenly matched.<\/p>\n
Then the moment happened. Filip J\u00f6rgensen was picked ahead of Robert S\u00e1nchez for this game. The suggestion is he plays more comfortably with the ball at his feet. This may well be true. But here J\u00f6rgensen made a horrible, game-defining mistake with his feet, attempting a pass under pressure, only to see the ball plucked out of its arc by the leg of Bradley Barcola.<\/p>\n
From there it was funnelled back by Kvaratskhelia to Vitinha, who produced a delightful lobbed finish over the stranded J\u00f6rgensen, a finish that felt like a moment of slapstick, like custard pie\u2011ing someone who has already been bonked in the head by a man turning around with a ladder.<\/p>\n
And from that moment this was also Kvaratskhelia\u2019s game. By the time the final whistle was blown, PSG had won the 28 second\u2011half minutes he was on the pitch 3-0, and switched in the process to full\u2011on high imperial ball-hog machine. They will come to London next week with a 5-2 lead, and the sense of a team remembering itself.<\/p>\n
Liam Rosenior and Chelsea twice fought back to equalise but wilted in the final 10 minutes in Paris. Photograph: James Marsh\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n
Kvaratskhelia\u2019s contribution to this was two goals and an assist, plus the familial spectacle of a man bending the day to his will. He is a lovely footballer to watch, not to mention an amusingly retro-styled human being. Socks that don\u2019t fit. Shorts that seem to have been aggressively shredded in the wash for the past nine years.<\/p>\n
He runs like running is a fun thing to do, a kind of high\u2011speed mooch. Even the ball is a different shape in his possession. It\u2019s an oval. It\u2019s a crunched up tin can. It does different things, finds different angles, sticks to his clumpy\u2011twinkly feet as he shoe-gazes his way through your defence. Above all Kvaratskhelia feels like a visitor from a different decade, some shaggy\u2011haired, hyper-skilled time traveller, out there cradling a large sandwich and being trailed by a cartoon dog.<\/p>\n
His first goal here, PSG\u2019s fourth on 86 minutes, was the outstanding single contribution, swerving inside, weaving a little, dragging players with him, then hitting a right-foot shot of such power it drew a collective shout from the crowd as it zinged into the top corner.<\/p>\n
Chelsea lost because of brilliance then. But also because of naivety. And here Liam Rosenior will face some criticism. Was it unexpected that J\u00f6rgensen should make his game\u2011changing mistake? Not really. Rosenior selected his ball\u2011playing goalkeeper to face the best pressing team in Europe, the only team you watch just to enjoy their pressing, the use of speed and running power as defensive tools, the fury, the basic intimidation of that press.<\/p>\n
PSG\u2019s status as the best team in the world last year was built around that supercharged front six, a midfield that walks out wound up into a state of pre-tackle intoxication, Ousmane Demb\u00e9l\u00e9 posing like a sprinter ready to close down restarts, pure performative graft.<\/p>\n
They ramped it up again here from the start. Luis Enrique was pitchside early on in a high-end black robe and baggy gym clothes combination, arms crossed, eyes glowering, like an ageing Jedi master scanning the skies from his remote intergalactic island. So, you\u2019re going to play out from the back a lot then? OK then.<\/p>\n
Ahead of this game Rosenior had stated that last year\u2019s Club World Club final<\/a> was \u201cirrelevant\u201d. Maybe so. But not entirely. The tactic he employed here was the exact opposite of what Enzo Maresca had done to PSG in East Rutherford, where the key gambit was to hit the spaces behind the full-backs, go long, defeat the press by ignoring it. As a child Rosenior famously read Charles Hughes\u2019 football tactics manual, the high priest of Pomo, second ball, attack by numbers. He knows his stuff.<\/p>\nBut then Rosenior is also learning. He looks like a manager and talks like one. \u201cAn assignment was missed,\u201d he said after Burnley had scored from a corner last month, sounding like a shadowy mandarin in charge of a secret CIA assassination unit. This was another one missed, but in Rosenior\u2019s own planning stage, a freakish mistake with its own sense of cause and effect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Oh Filip. Welcome to the Premier League\u2019s latest bonus content machine. Barbecuing wide\u2011eyed second\u2011choice European goalkeepers over a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":535610,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-535609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=535609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/535610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=535609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=535609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=535609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}