Fate is cruel. PSG played this Sunday in Cologne, the 50th and last official match of its season, in all competitions (29 in the league, 20 in the Champions League and 1 in the Coupe de France). He only lost five in total. He reigned supreme in France by winning an 8th league title and the Coupe de France in a dry final.
But Paris lost two matches that should not be lost: a first in December already here in Cologne in the semi-final of the Champions League version 2019-2020 against Barcelona. This defeat remains forgivable: the already private workforce of Nikola Karabatic was weighed down by the cases of Covid. Saturday, he lost again a semi-final of the Champions League in front of the Danes of Aalborg (33-35), in Cologne in this Lanxess Arena that PSG will end up resenting. This setback is much more incomprehensible and almost unforgivable. These two defeats are in any case enough on their own to make the balance sheet of PSG at the time of fair average accounts. “Do not throw in the trash everything we have done this season which has been hard with the camera, fatigue, injuries, the Covid” asks Nedim Remili. He is right of course but the Grail always flees Paris which in five participations at the table of the great and in the Final Four has still not managed to return home with the dishes. When history takes a look at PSG’s 2020-2021 version of the prize list, it will only look at this white line even if it is cruel and undoubtedly unfair.
Left out of the final the day before, Paris this Sunday found sufficient resources to take third place in the Final Four. Paris defeated Nantes (31-28), the only French team that managed to beat PSG this year in the Starligue (24-25, end of April). Paris won a close match without a stake, in an atmosphere just warmed up by a few Nantes and Parisian supporters who came to wave flags in a room where the number of spectators was limited to 1000. It is very little in an enclosure as large as AccorHotels Arena and that did not help to make this weekend a successful celebration on the French side. Paris took third place in the Champions League as in 2016, 2018 and 2020. The Parisians have never lost a small final in this competition. Not at all sure that this is enough to comfort them because they have never yet managed to win the big one, the only one that matters. This one between Barcelona and Aalborg, will still be played without them at the end of the day.
