Neymar wept in pain when the paramedics carried him away on the stretcher. Yet again. The Brazilian soccer star experienced moments like these too often in his career. In connection with his club Paris St. Germain, this picture is almost symbolic: enthusiasm is followed by sadness. And that evening it was sad for Neymar and PSG. With the 0: 1 (0: 1) home defeat in the top game of Ligue 1 against Olympique Lyon, France’s supposed class leader not only lost a football game. But also Neymar, the championship lead and happiness, it seemed. “We were mentally never ready for this game, we were at the end,” said the German PSG coach Thomas Tuchel: “That was a big setback after the last few games.”
Actually, Lyon’s winning goal by Tino Kadewere (35th) and the fall to third place in the table would have been enough to drive Tuchel to despair, but there was still the seventh minute of stoppage time. Olympique professional Thiago Mendes drove Neymar a little impetuously, but not maliciously, in the legs. The magic foot, it cracked. Mendes saw the red card after the referee reviewed the scene on the video screen. Previously, the referee had only drawn a yellow card.
How bad it really is with Neymar is not yet entirely clear. The club officially described the results of the first examination on Monday as “calming” and spoke of a “sprain of the ankle”. Neymar himself stressed on Instagram: “It could have been worse.” Further tests should follow in the next 48 hours. The ball artist’s father meanwhile expressed himself somewhat martially on social media. “We talked so much about it, about the violence”, Neymar Santos Sr. posted on Instagram: “Let’s keep going and football will lose a lot.”
He remembers all too well the many times Neymar was injured. Hardly a season goes by without a long break for the 28-year-old, who is fouled more often than almost anyone else. Meanwhile, “culprit” Mendes was remorseful: “Mistakes happen. But I sincerely apologize to Neymar, ”he wrote on Instagram. Neither Tuchel nor Neymar can buy a lot of it. For both – and thus also for Paris as a whole – things have been better again recently. After the racism scandal last week, PSG reached the last sixteen in the Champions League by beating Basaksehir Istanbul 5-1. Also thanks to three Neymar goals.
After the bankruptcy against Lyon, that seems a long way off. The feeling of elation has given way to displeasure. And that is Tuchel’s constant companion this season. After the lost Champions League final against Bayern Munich in August, expectations were high. Winning the premier class has always been the big dream of the bosses from Qatar, the national success was practically incidental. But even this minimum target is currently up for debate. The Tuchel team is already experiencing one more defeat than in the previous season, which was canceled due to Corona, in which it lost three times.
Tuchel, whose contract expires at the end of the season and whose whereabouts are anything but certain, felt responsible for the situation. “It’s my fault,” he said after the Lyon bankruptcy. He did not correctly assess the fatigue of his professionals, who suffer from the tight schedule. He would have exchanged “three, four, five or six” players compared to the Istanbul game if he had noticed. In retrospect, it might have thanked him for Neymar.
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