Thứ Năm, 7 tháng 4, 2016

David Luiz and Eliaquim Mangala belie price tags amid breathless bedlam

Sergio Aguero and David Luiz

These are the champions. Die Meister! Die Besten! That is, just as long as you don’t ask either of them to do any actual defending. Before kick‑off on a raucous night at the Parc des Princes, Manchester City’s fans could be heard once again booing the Uefa anthem as it echoed around this giant concrete spaceship of a stadium. It was a theme immediately taken up by both teams in an entertaining, slightly wild 2-2 draw that at times resembled less a game of football, more a piece of elaborate protest theatre against the idea of competent elite level defending.
Not that any of this was unexpected. A night of attack against defence had always seemed on the cards. At one end: City’s jerry-built defence against the rapacious Zlatan Ibrahimovic, king of the Parc. At the other, Sergio Agüero and Kevin De Bruyne up against David Luiz, a more stately kind of error-prone megabucks central defender.
So it turned out to be, as a rollicking night produced four goals and a succession of howlers and scuffs and defensive rickets. At the end of which City will fancy their chances of getting the better of a home team who seemed a little muted by the end, unable to find that familiar crumple point in opponents who were panicky in the first half but increasingly resilient, with De Bruyne a consistently menacing attacking presence.
Quite how much further either of these teams might hope to go from here is another matter. Certainly in the first hour Eliaquim Mangala and David Luiz looked unlikely candidates for the title of the two most expensive defenders ever. Albeit David Luiz was, as ever, a stirring, driving presence in between the moments of goofiness. This is a player who clearly believes at all times he is without doubt the greatest footballer in the world. Now and then, when all the cogs are in sync, the parts oiled, he even looks like the greatest footballer in the world – if the greatest footballer in the world was made from balloons and sausages and tinsel.
Here, with just 20 seconds gone, he did something so David Luiz it was almost a parody of David Luiz-ishness, tugging Agüero down by the arm just outside the area, earning a yellow card and a one-match ban. After which it was over to you, old bean, as Edinson Cavani sent Blaise Matuidi in on goal at the other end. Mangala, galloping back zanily, seemed to jostle him off the ball.
It could have been a penalty and a red card. Without doubt it was a panicky piece of covering by numbers, the defensive equivalent of that moment at the end of a game of crown green bowls where the players just give up and hurl their last bowl down the middle like a cannonball hoping the pieces fall kindly. At this point we weren’t even past the 10-minute mark.
A moment of defensive crisis was coming. On 12 minutes it duly arrived. David Luiz (of course) carried the ball into the area. Bacary Sagna fell for the jink and allowed the Brazilian to tangle his leg into his own and induce a penalty kick. Joe Hart waited for Ibrahimovic to blink and plunged to his left to make a good save.
And so on we went. Before long, Nicolás Otamendi was hurtling feet-first into tackles in the PSG half, not so much playing football as performing a kind of kung fu yoga routine while a football match went on around him. Something somewhere had to give, some punchline applied to this defensive high-jinkery. It came at both ends in quick succession.
De Bruyne’s finish for the opening goal was emphatic, the ball belted through Kevin Trapp. It was made by Fernandinho’s nice pass and helped at the last – of course – by an attempt at an airborne running reverse double backheel by David Luiz inside his own penalty area.
Moments later it was horror at the other end as Ibrahimovic equalised via a stunning error from Fernando, who dithered on the ball as the most lethal player on the pitch closed him down, and then simply deflected it into the net off the Zlatan shin. Not just a mistake, but a genuine work of the imagination.
Still the gaps loomed as a thoroughly entertaining second half rumbled on. PSG’s second was neatly finished by Adrien Rabiot but it came from a corner conceded after a sliding non-interception by Otamendi, who by now seemed intent on seeing out the rest of the game lying down, scything his legs around like a drunken breakdancer. City’s equaliser came from another mistake, Fernandinho walloping a shot after a piece of terrible control from Thiago Silva.
Yet by the end the gravity of the game seemed to have shifted, City’s defence entered a neutral gear. Mangala in particular was praised by his manager for a performance that grew as the night wore on. The suggestion is the Frenchman will be sold in the summer when Pep Guardiola arrives, a man who is famously sniffy over his polyvalent defensive distributors. If so, perhaps the last 20 minutes here might even stand as an unlikely high point at City for a player of power and presence who seems to have it all right up until the moment he suddenly doesn’t. For now, rather unexpectedly after the chaos of that opening hour, he will at least always have Paris.

Không có nhận xét nào:

Đăng nhận xét