Soft Power 3. Soft Drink 0. All good things come to those who wait. Or at least, to those who can spend a billion Euros constructing a beautifully balanced, star-powered team.
Eight years on from the point of ignition, at the end of a strange, distended knock-out summer, the Paris Saint-Germain Football Project will play out its first Champions League final this weekend in Lisbon.
It seemed fitting – a tribute to football’s indestructibility, the sense of mischief and art that exists even within such teams – that this oddly untaxing 3-0 win was also a victory for PSG’s attacking art against the admirable collectivism of RB Leipzig.
Above all it was a victory for the brilliance of the Neymar-Mbappé-Di María front three, who produced some wonderful moments of attacking clarity. With thirty-five minutes gone Neymar could be seen musing to himself over a free-kick way out on the far touchline. Skipping back, he produced an outrageous piece of chutzpah, drilling the free-kick in a low arc on to the outside of the near post, with Peter Gulacsi doggy-paddling along his goal-line.
Neymar giggled, horribly. And in those moments RB Leipzig looked spooked, frazzled, a team reading from the wrong 17-stage tactical manual while all around them a football match insisted on taking place. Much had been made before this game of Leipzig’s singularity of purpose. Here the super-caffeinated tactical darlings of the Bundesliga looked outmatched and unbalanced, bothered constantly by the precision of the Paris attacks.
Shortly before half time Neymar did something equally upsetting, producing a kind of soft-pedal, reverse-twist playground flick to help the ball into the path of Ángel Di María after a terrible mix-up in the Leipzig backline.
Di María finished beautifully to make it 2-0. Earlier in the half that same super-intelligent left foot had created the opening PSG goal with a masterpiece of a free-kick. The ball from Di María wasn’t so much ‘put into a good area’ as ushered behind the velvet rope, up the stairs, through the hidden mirrored doorway and into the VIP section of good areas, that A-list corner where only the best of the of the very best lurk. Marquinhos rose unmarked to flick it on into the corner.
Ten minutes into the second half, it was Di María again with the flashing blade, his cross headed in by Juan Bernat to kill a game that was, in effect, already dead. In an infuriating twist the goalscorer had been played onside by the righ-back Nordi Mukiele, who had fallen over his own feet then remained writhing on the ground, forgetting for a moment one key component of defending: actually doing some defending.
As Leipzig paddled to stay afloat there were elements of individualism versus collectivism to all this. Neymar was irresistible in patches, but still vague in his final touches. Mbappé was a constant threat. Di María was the star of this game.
Aged 32 he is still wonderfully lithe in his movements. In Lisbon he made two and scored one. He dribbled like a winger, cleared the ball like a full-back, and looked like what he is, a genuine aristocrat of this competition. This was Di María’s third game since March. The week to come will do him good. This is a man who knows how to play these finals.
Otherwise it was a hugely commanding performance from a team that is, we’re often assured, prone to choking on this stage. Instead it was Leipzig who were made to look callow, and Julian Nagelsmann who will perhaps be accused, Pep-style, of blinking on the big stage.
If so it was a very minor case of tactical tinkering in the face of Thomas Tuchel’s star machine. The Nagelsmann-Tuchel dynamic has probably been a little overdone in any case. “I was just his player,” Nagelsmann said in the build-up, and they are men apart in other ways. Tuchel seems a slightly colder figure in the flesh, approaching each game with the distracted intensity of a bookish young history don trying to work out how to rewire a plug. Nagelsmann has a more obvious charisma, his methods more obviously ingrained in this box-fresh group of players. “We need to make them work,” Nagelsmann had said before kick-off. But he was outflanked by the occasion here, drawing the strength from his own fearless, hard-running team with a shift to a more cautious back-four.
Leipzig had started well enough, but they were completely derailed by the opening goal. It is an enduring feature of football that even the most drilled tactical system can be derailed by human error. Never mind the big-screen tactical symposiums, the Pavlovian mental training. This was a case of neglecting the basics as Di María’s free-kick was headed in without interference from anything as base as man-marking or attacking the ball.
After which Leipzig seemed to be playing through a mist. Their touches were vague. Some heavy-legged challenges led to a constant drip of free-kicks. At times the PSG midfield clipped and flipped the ball between the white shirts with a kind of disdain, toying with the much-vaunted counter-press.
And so Qatar will have its Champions League final, just a year before its winter World Cup. Bayern Munich, PSG’s most likely opponents, would provide a far sterner test come Sunday night. But in Di María’s brilliance, Neymar’s invention and Mbappé’s edge there is an irresistible charm to this unprecedented creation; not to mention a gathering sense of destiny.