By facing Maccabi Haifa (7-2) on Tuesday in the Champions League then Troyes (4-3) this Saturday in Ligue 1, Paris Saint-Germain expected to score a lot of goals, and it did not fail. On the other hand, the capital club had certainly not planned to take so many against two modest opponents…
While the defense was already at the center of concerns after Tuesday’s success, the three goals conceded against Troyes led to the triggering of a real state of alert at this level. Mama Baldé alone on the opener, Presnel Kimpembe, recently returned from injury, apathetic on the second goal, a mess on the last… The Parisian rearguard showed too many shortcomings for a contender for the final victory in the Champions League. An observation of which the players are perfectly aware.
In attack it was the carnival led by Neymar, in defense a circus at PSG… #PSGESTAC
— Nabil Djellit (@Nabil_djellit) October 29, 2022
“Admittedly, we scored four goals, that’s very good. But you can’t take three at home. We need to find a better balance“, pestered midfielder Marco Verratti at the microphone of Prime Video. “We had a game with a lot of mistakes, we should have done better, we suffered and we defended badly“, Abounded his buddy of the midfield Vitinha. And the opinion of Christophe Galtier in all this? Annoyed by the shortcomings displayed by his team in this area when the 4-3-3 had given the illusion of a semblance of balance, the Parisian coach promised a double ration of defensive work in training!
Galtier-“We got a little carried away”
“The team was very unbalanced from the start, some had trouble finding benchmarks, we won very few balls in the high recovery, each time we went to the duel we were eliminated, which left boulevards in Troyes. We were very nice in the reaction to the loss, which made the game difficult for us“, scolded the former coach of Lille. “I saw far too much largesse, far too many errors, yet another bad placement from a set piece. We will have to fix it, work, we will spend a lot more time there. If you have to score four goals to win each time, it will be complicated. We let ourselves be a little drunk because we succeeded on the offensive level. We were completely open.“Last big match before the World Cup, the trip to Juventus Turin on Wednesday in C1 will serve as a life-size test.
