Well, it was never going to be quite the same. You only get one all-time high, one first kiss, one Catcher in the Rye, one loved-up alien-ball dreamscape of a game like the first leg between these two teams.
In the event Bayern Munich never really laid a glove on Paris Saint-Germain at the Allianz Arena. They trailed from the third minute to Ousmane Dembélé’s goal, drew level on the night through Harry Kane at the death, but looked in between like a team trying to generate energy from a standing start, always kept at one remove by the extended arm, the palm on their forehead, fists whirling in the empty air between.
And so now we know. For all the bold red power of that first leg, there wasn’t ever really that much mystery about the identity of Arsenal’s opponents in the Champions League final at the end of May. It had to be you, wonderful you, perfectly constructed petro-state project you.
In Munich PSG proved again what was already true: this is the best team in the world, the state-of-the-art, so smooth, surgical and handsomely tuned they could almost be an AI simulation of perfect human football movement. This PSG has become a team without flaws, only strengths, high-spec parts in every role. Except perhaps for the goalkeeper, who still seems to have wandered in from a rave in Kent in 1989, although even this could be just a lure to tempt you into having a go.
So the stage is set for the Puskas Arena in clammy early summer. Over to you, Arsenal. How do you beat this PSG team, the full version, in spring form, pumped and fresh and geared entirely for this moment?
Qatar-era PSG was always destined to become a machine for winning. This is a club that has gamed its own league, which spent years clumsily distorting the European transfer market, then finally decided to just focus on winning like it can, with bottomless reserves, zero financial jeopardy, able to import and also grow the world’s best playing and coaching talent.
At the same time two things can be true. This is the deceptive beauty of sport, because PSG are also a wonderful team and a model of certain sporting values. The club hierarchy has been exemplary in empowering Luis Enrique, who came here looking like a fisherman in a waxy poacher’s coat, with the hair, stubble and blazing eyes of a man who lives in a shed and guts his own rabbits.
Give him all the players. Luxuriate also in France’s unmatched coaching and development culture. There were four French players in the PSG team, and two in Bayern’s. Luis Enrique’s team press and rat. They can control with slow possession-ball. They can score from set pieces. The real difference, though, comes in the vertiginous quality of their attackers.
Bukayo Saka, for example, is a very good player. But he’s not at the level of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia for trickery and imagination, or Dembélé when it comes to two-footed speed and grace, or even the extreme dribbling facility of Désiré Doué.
These really are hand-picked attacking scalpels, perfectly balanced, primed to do only two things: press like maniacs when you have the ball, and only go forward when they have it, freed up by an unceasing blizzard of counter-pressing at their backs.
Bayern’s right side told that story here. It took two minutes and 20 seconds to rip it open. Fabián Ruiz set Kvaratskhelia away with a lovely clipped pass. The cross to Dembélé was just right. He pinged the ball into the roof of the net. It was an excellent goal, a set move that reduced Bayern to an arrangement of cones.
But Bayern’s right-back, taken out of the move early on, was Konrad Laimer. Laimer was a kind of spirit animal pick here, the Bayern-geist player and team factotum. He’s a good player, but he’s not a proper right-back, let alone an elite one. Watching him try to shut down Kvaratskhelia here was like seeing a normal human man up against an attack made up of hyper-skilled futuristic aliens.
Laimer will have left the Allianz Arena whirling around every 10 steps looking for Kvaratskhelia, checking he isn’t already in the back seat of his car, or lounging feet-up on his sofa when he flicks the lights on at home, already eating his last pot of frozen yoghurt.
So what do Arsenal do about this? Before the tie Vincent Kompany said you can’t beat PSG by defending. Kompany was up on his touchline from the start, decked out in black baseball cap and silly bomber jacket like a celebrity Las Vegas bodyguard. And he was right but also wrong. Bayern can’t beat PSG by defending, because they don’t keep clean sheets, don’t reel themselves in, don’t compromise. Well, we know someone who will do that.
Arsenal are the best defensive team in Europe. So defend then. Spoil. Reel off the greatest display yet of passive-aggressive suffocation-ball. It will require elite levels of concentration and also luck. But PSG do have some defensive frailties when pressed hard, and Bayern should have had a penalty for handball. Pound the set pieces. Try to win it 1-0.
No doubt the purists will hold their perfumed ‘kerchiefs to their noses if this happens, will claim that only a kind of free-running TikTok reel style can really be called entertaining football. But they would of course be wrong. This is the beauty of the game. It’s supposed to be difficult, monotonous at times. Its sublime moments carved out of genuine resistance. PSG are the best team in Europe. But there would be no better way to prove it than by applying their creative brilliance to an Arsenal team that makes them sweat for every inch.
