WHO KNEW THAT all we needed in the millenia-spanning quest for cosmic justice was a little TV screen by the side of a football pitch?
To deal with the banalities of football justice for a moment: Presnel Kimpembe’s jutting his arm out in blocking Diogo Dalot’s late shot was a penalty under the game’s rules, so the correct decision was (belatedly) reached.
The laws need to be reviewed if decisions continue to be so in slow motion, but under the rules both sides implicitly accepted by turning up in the place, the officials made the right call.
Granted, PSG have never shown themselves to be too keen on the Champions League’s rules, but it is their misfortune that the ones governing life between white lines are more strictly enforced than those outside outside them.
Uefa are investigating the club following Der Spiegel’s publishing of documents exposed by Football Leaks, claiming that that PSG inflated the value of sponsorship deals to circumvent the FFP rules and while the club deny any wrongdoing, the fallout will be their last Uefa-related tangle of the season.
They are out of the Champions League at the last-16 stage for the third-straight year, once again contriving to blow a comfortable first-leg advantage while United’s improbable run under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer shows no signs of running out of road.
After triumphing against a side whose expression of self-identity has thus far consisted of becoming a ‘lifestyle brand’, Solskjaer returned to his idea of United as being a brand of a certain way of living.
“This is how we do things at Man United”, said Solskjaer, having hewn into history one of the club’s greatest European nights.
Solskjaer’s constant referring back to the club’s identity can become cloying, but it serves a purpose on nights like these.
The promotion of youth has become a central plank of this approach, and lost amid the plaudits for Rashford’s coolness from the penalty spot was the fact that he was, relatively speaking, a grizzled veteran among United’s attackers: Dalot, Chong and Greenwood are all teenagers.
Ashley Young, Chris Smalling, Victor Lindelof, and Luke Shaw were genuinely outstanding as rugged, determined presences at the back for United, with Fred suddenly transforming from delicate figure of excess to a kind of wild and snapping dog of war.
All of these players seem liberated by the fact they are playing for some kind of purpose; of playing for something bigger than themselves.
Jose Mourinho’s higher cause was a miserly, limiting one: an underdog, siege mentality rarely works at the second-richest club on the planet.
To enforce it, he relied on a kind of warping of reality, and thus all value judgements on players’ attitude and contribution had to be filtered through Mourinho’s own, deliberately distorting view. How else to explain his ludicrous assertion that United are lacking in “football heritage?”
Rather than making United’s purpose bigger than anyone, he made it no larger than his capricious self.
Solskjaer has given the players something else to play for, and central to it his showing a characteristic Mourinho has squashed to the deepest, darkest corners of his self: humility.
The selection of Eric Bailly at right-back was the most egregious error of Solskjaer’s reign thus far, and for 34 minutes he was shredded by Angel Di Maria and Juan Bernat. He was bewilderingly lost, constantly drifting in-field to play as the third centre-back that nobody wanted.
Bailly’s dawdling was the most significant contributing factor to Bernat’s early equaliser, but Solskajer creditably admitted his own mistake. Dalot replaced Bailly before half-time, with Ashley Young dropping to right-back.
Contrast that to the decision-making of Neurotic Alpine Scientist Unsure If He Should Really Be Executing A Bond Villain’s Desires Thomas Tuchel, who left Timo Kehrer chastened at right-back for 70 minutes while the much better Thomas Meunier sat on the bench.
While United relied on considerable amounts of fortune for their goals, to attribute it just to luck is to ignore their superb defensive display, in which Lindelof and Smalling found levels that had hitherto never touched.
They were also helped by a curiously muddled second-half performance by PSG in which they didn’t decide to attack or defend, instead merely waiting for time to pass in hope.
This was a night to show that Manchester United remains an occasionally audacious idea worth believing in, and against a club still a little unsure of what they are…that can count for something.
Subscribe to our new podcast, The42 Rugby Weekly, here:
