Victory over Liverpool felt like the Champions League making of Thomas Tuchel – but more importantly PSG
Tuchel managed to do something on Wednesday night that his predecessors failed to achieve all too often, and this could finally be the year that the penny has dropped for PSG in Europe
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Your support makes all the difference.The Champions League has broken Paris Saint-Germain managers in the past. Laurent Blanc was sacked for losing in the quarter-final to a weak Manchester City side in 2016. Unai Emery never recovered from collapsing at Barcelona the following year. If PSG had lost to Liverpool on Wednesday night, and been knocked out at the group stage, it is impossible to see how Thomas Tuchel could have survived.
But they won, 2-1, and in the joyous aftermath, the players dancing on the pitch long after the end, it was possible to sense a change, or at least the start of something. For the first time in more than a year, PSG had beaten another top side in Europe. It is the sort result that can make a managerial tenure, rather than break one. And Tuchel could not hide his pride and delight in the post-match press conference.
What really stood out in Tuchel’s comments was this sense that PSG are starting afresh under him. It never felt, under Carlo Ancelotti, Laurent Blanc or Unai Emery, as if the club was making much progress. The stories were the same, as they tried and failed to reach the semi-finals of the Champions League, something that they still have not done.
But Tuchel’s great achievement has been to re-cast this as a young team with a mission. He spoke beforehand of how much more experience have than PSG, which is technically true, but feels a strange complaint when he has Neymar, Kylian Mbappe, Angel di Maria and Gianluigi Buffon on the pitch. And yet Tuchel spoke afterwards as if his team had proven something for the first time out there, and made a long overdue mental breakthrough in doing so.
“This was our last opportunity to show we are able to fight,” Tuchel said, in his precise and improving French in his press conference. “Liverpool have an incredible mentality and this is why it was necessary to show we are able to play and fight against this team. This was our last chance to really show we can play a big game against a big team. It was a big step forward for us.”
Jurgen Klopp had his complaints about PSG’s play-acting but he was impressed by their performance and by Tuchel’s tactical bravery. “When you saw the line-up, the approach they chose was full risk. Especially in the beginning, they would try anything as long as their legs would carry them. And with the quality they have, it was quite intense to deal with.”
What this meant in practice was a 4-4-2 with Kylian Mbappe and Edinson Cavani up front, and Neymar and Angel di Maria tucked from the wide areas, and with Marquinhos and Marco Verratti sat in front of the defence to protect them. And after so much criticism that they could not play with the right level of intensity to beat serious opposition, they tore into Liverpool in the first half in a way you do not often see PSG teams play.
Even more impressive was the two-way relationship between the team and the crowd, each feeding off the energy of the other, every player geeing them up whenever he had a spare second. It is par for the course at most big clubs but at PSG everything is such a procession so often that this much emotion felt new in itself. Tuchel certainly revelled in it too.
The challenge now, if PSG do get through, is to replicate this same intensity in the last-16. Last year they wilted in two legs against Real Madrid but if they play like this in February then no one will want to come here. Not even the back-to-back-to-back champions. Tuchel has finally lit a flame here and now he must keep it burning. “We must conserve this spirit,” he said. “It is good to create a new atmosphere, a new culture. We did not have the experience, and now we feel something.”
Maybe they will lose again in the last-16 or quarter-finals, like they have always done in the Qatar era. But if they do not, and this is the year they finally make it into the serious stages, then this evening up against Liverpool will be remembered as the night when the penny finally dropped.
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