PSG Showed With Dogged Bayern Munich Display They Can Do the Dirty Work, Too | OneFootball

Paris Saint-Germain put in a brilliant defensive display to see out a 1-1 draw at Bayern Munich that took them through to the UEFA Champions League final.

After the drama of last week’s thriller, Wednesday’s return match between Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich was always going to struggle to live up to expectations.

In Paris, it had felt like every attack would result in a goal. Nine goals were scored from just 22 shots. Two of the best and most free-flowing attacks were going toe-to-toe, and neither defence could handle it.

PSG took a one-goal lead to Germany, but the tie was far from over. Coming into the match Bayern were Europe’s top scorers, with 190 goals in 56 games in all competitions this season, an average of 3.4 per game and 62 more than any other team in the top five leagues (Barcelona were second with 138 in 53 games). They would have backed themselves to score twice against any opponent, even the European champions.

An early concession when Ousmane Dembélé opened the scoring didn’t really change their task. They still needed to score twice, and they wouldn’t have panicked, not least because they scored two goals in three second-half minutes shortly after going 5-2 down in the first leg.

But this time, PSG shut Bayern out. There was a late consolation when Harry Kane fired into the roof of the net in stoppage time, but PSG got the result they needed to progress to a second successive Champions League final. Unlike the first-leg win, this result was built on dogged defending, immaculate shape and total commitment without the ball.

The final is pretty roundly – and fairly reasonably – being billed as PSG’s formidable attack against Arsenal’s exceptional defence. How Mikel Arteta’s side cope with stopping Dembélé, Désiré Doué, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Bradley Barcola may well decide who wins the Champions League. But PSG showed they can also do the dirty work, too, putting in as resolute a defensive performance as you’ll see in this season’s competition. Arsenal face a challenge to break this team down.

Bayern managed to carve out 18 attempts on goal, but PSG restricted them to their lowest expected goals total (1.41) in a home game in any competition this season. Bayern’s shots were also worth an average of just 0.08 xG, which was by a distance their lowest in a home game this season, and their second-lowest overall, after an away Bundesliga win at Köln in early January, just after the winter break. That day, however, Bayern still scored three goals.

PSG restricted Bayern to low-quality chances all game, as the below graphic shows. Kane eventually scored one of their many half-chances with one of the last kicks of the tie, but it was too little, too late.

Luis Enrique was happy for his team to allow Bayern to have the ball, with PSG registering their lowest possession (34.4%) in any game in any competition in more than five years, since a Champions League round-of-16 meeting with Barcelona in March 2021. It was nothing like anything we have seen from them in the Champions League this season; they normally control possession all over the pitch, but barely did so at all in this game.

PSG have dominated the pitch throughout their UCL campaign this season

Against Bayern, PSG saw significantly less of the ball than usual

They dropped back into a compact shape and defended as a brilliant unit. Man of the match Willian Pacho was exceptional at the heart of the defence, making a match-high five tackles and five clearances. Marquinhos was typically unflustered alongside him despite facing Europe’s best attack, and 20-year-old Warren Zaïre-Emery did a wonderful job of keeping the lively Luis Días in check while standing in for Achraf Hakimi at right-back.

Even though they have one of the best midfield trios in world football when it comes to keeping hold of the ball, on this occasion, PSG were happy to bypass the middle of the pitch entirely. Wingers Kvaratskhelia (57) and Doué (47) each had more touches of the ball than any of the midfield three – Vitinha (45), João Neves (39) and Fabián Ruiz (32) – and Doué went off after 76 minutes.

PSG persistently went long. There have only been three instances of a team taking more goal-kicks long upfield in a Champions League game this season than they did against Bayern (13), and those were Pafos vs Kairat (19) and Bodø/Glimt twice, vs Inter (18) and Sporting (14). In other words, this isn’t a common tactic of a favourite; it is the work of an underdog.

Overall, PSG played 22.3% of their passes long, which was the seventh highest by any team in a Champions League game this season, and the highest by a team in any knockout game beyond the play-off round. The teams that go deep in Europe’s biggest competition don’t tend to go long as much as PSG did in Munich.

This wasn’t typical PSG. They are at their best when dominating the ball and they have the quality to play any opponent off the park when they do.

In the final against Arsenal, they will be expected to monopolise the ball. Luis Enrique’s side were the best team in Europe last season and they might well be this time around, too.

However, against Bayern on Wednesday, they showed they have far more to their game than their sensational attacking players. They are team of excellent individuals who also combine into a collective defensive unit that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Even if they dominate possession in the final, they will face periods of Arsenal pressure, and will need to be at their best at the back if they are to win back-to-back Champions League titles. In the second leg against Bayern, they showed that they can do the ugly side of the game very well, too. In Budapest later this month, Arsenal will face a huge challenge at both ends of the pitch.

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