Oh Filip. Welcome to the Premier League’s latest bonus content machine. Barbecuing wide‑eyed second‑choice European goalkeepers over a high heat on some foreign field.
It will be tempting to dwell on the moment Chelsea started losing this game. 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‑Germain’s front six, in particular the brilliantly moreish Khvicha Kvaratskhelia.
Chelsea had played well for 74 minutes at the Parc des Princes. They came from behind twice, exploited space behind the flying full‑backs 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.
Elite football may be a systems‑slog. It may at times resemble a 22-man competitive knitting festival. But this didn’t feel like that. It was peppy, brisk, and evenly matched.
Then the moment happened. Filip Jörgensen was picked ahead of Robert Sánchez for this game. The suggestion is he plays more comfortably with the ball at his feet. This may well be true. But here Jörgensen 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.
From there it was funnelled back by Kvaratskhelia to Vitinha, who produced a delightful lobbed finish over the stranded Jörgensen, a finish that felt like a moment of slapstick, like custard pie‑ing someone who has already been bonked in the head by a man turning around with a ladder.
And from that moment this was also Kvaratskhelia’s game. By the time the final whistle was blown PSG had won the 28 second‑half minutes he was on the pitch 3-0, and switched in the process to full‑on 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.
Kvaratskhelia’s 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’t fit. Shorts that seem to have been aggressively shredded in the wash for the past nine years.
He runs like running is fun thing to do, a kind of high‑speed mooch. Even the ball is a different shape in his possession. It’s an oval. It’s a crunched up tin can. It does different things, finds different angles, sticks to his clumpy‑twinkly feet as he shoe-gazes his way through your defence. Above all Kvaratskhelia feels like a visitor from a different decade, some shaggy‑haired, hyper-skilled time traveller, out there cradling a large sandwich and being trailed by a cartoon dog.
His first goal here, PSG’s 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.
Chelsea lost because of brilliance then. But also because of naivety. And here Liam Rosenior will face some criticism. Was it unexpected that Jörgensen should make his game‑changing mistake? Not really. Rosenior selected his ball‑playing 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.
PSG’s 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 Dembélé posing like a sprinter ready to close down restarts, pure performative graft.
They ramped it up again here from the start. Luis Enrique was pitch-side 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’re going to play out from the back a lot then? OK then.
Ahead of this game Rosenior had stated that the world club cup final was “irrelevant”. 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’ Football Tactics manual, the high priest of Pomo, second ball, attack by numbers. He knows his stuff.
But then Rosenior is also learning. He looks like a manager and talks like one. “An assignment was missed,” he said after Burnley had scored from a corner this moths, sounding like a shadowy mandarin in charge of a secret CIA assassination unit. This was another one missed, but in Rosenior’s own planning stage, a freakish mistake with its own sense of cause and effect.