From Lisbon, With Longing
I hope to fuck this is an image of downtown Lisbon …
Despite my emotional circumstances I’ve watched an inordinate amount of football lately, and also baseball highlights – which is to say, plenty. Repressed desires have clashed repeatedly with my personal football values, amongst these:
That Barcelona is the rightful home of football;
That I am destined to die, for my passionate hatred of all things United, a Manchester City man;
That I want every possible success to befall young Julian Nagelsmann, before he is named manager of (sigh) Tottenham Hotspur within two to three years;
That I would like for Kylian Mbappe to remain happy in life … for happiness, surely, ought be the reward of such pure excellence; and that Lyon, perhaps the underdoggiest of them all, wouldn’t be a bad shout either.
On Sunday Paris St Germain face Bayern Munich in what has been an odd set of quarter- and semi-finals in a college basketball-style Champions League. We’re well past the peculiarity of having no fans in the stands. Teams will ball out anyway, it seems, as long as there is real silverware up for grabs and there are real cameras watching – perhaps even business existence at stake.
Here are some match summaries, building up to Sunday’s final, courtesy of myriad observations that sometimes have little to do with the actual football. Free Fernando Tatis Jr., while I’m out here.
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When Julian Nagelsmann and Diego Simeone’s sides clashed for RB Leipzig V Atletico Madrid, the game represented a direct clash between polar opposite footballs: the old Mourinho school of waiting defensively (Simeone), to pounce on a mistake by a more open, flowing expression of the beautiful game (Nagelsmann). In a previous post I may have mentioned that Leipzig run a drill in training that challenges them to get up the field and at goal within sixty seconds of fluid passing and running into shifting channels. You could see it against Atleti. It ran Simeone’s men ragged for an entire first half – and then not so much against PSG, who ensured they had a man waiting – hell, two – in just about every abstract passing lane.
I wager that this is how Thomas Tuchel might describe it, since he, like Nagelsmann, is a German tinkerer; and so some kind of student in the art of converting gegenpressing into total football. PSG closed the lanes with defenders who they knew they could turn without fuss into authors of counter-attacking play. They put as many bodies around the ball as Leipzig did when the Germans came forward, to then exploit gaps in the defense when Neymar, Mbappe and the Kraken were released from their dens.
Close control is absolutely critical, and you probably fall just short without that level of attacking quality leading you up the field. (Which is why Atleti, in the previous tie, only really began to threaten Leipzig when Joao Felix, a gifted juggler, came off the bench…) This was a more masterful performance from PSG than even the act of endurance and regimen that saw them do away with Atalanta just days before.
Their opponents in the final, Bayern Munich, have been served mostly by the tactical naiveté of Barcelona, who allowed them to romp around their backyard without anything remotely resembling a romping permit. Bayern have shown vulnerabilities at the back, and which Olympique Lyonnais threatened to expose in mid-week. But once they’re a goal up the Germans congest the midfield, and then they wait.
Their treasure chest of daggers matches up nicely against PSG’s: Serge Gnabry with the Robben-esque cuts inside; Alphonso Davies with the kitchen sink on the opposite flank; Thomas Muller always lurking just outside the box – and their true advantage is how many different areas of the pitch they can orchestrate attacks from. Paris has Neymar, Mbappe, and Di Maria for a front three; but Bayern play those calibers of player on the flanks, at the back, in the middle. If Sunday’s final is a professional waiting game, I worry about the side that doesn’t have rabbits hidden all across the field.
My heart says France, but my mind says Germans. I’m signing up for pragmatism lessons soon, so I wave my handkerchief for romance – one last time.
