Right so I've slept on this. Woke up feeling pretty sombre over the result, but there are a lot of positives here to take with us to the Leipzig game.
The first 20 minutes very kinda skittish. Mbappe in particular was a very big threat with that ridiculous pace, and for a while there I thought this was going to be a very long night. PSG get's a goal folllowing a lucky bounce, but can't really complain about that.
The 1-1 goal was deserves, the rest of the period was very comfortable for the team, we controlled possession and PSG never got close to anything much after their goal. It's ironic that we have some fans calling our goal a lucky deflection when PSG's 2 first goals came as a result from lucky deflections.
Second half up until their goal was such a fun period of Manchester United football. Perhaps the most fun minutes of the season bar the clobbering of Leipzig at home.
A team can only be asked to realisticly produce so many chances to score a goal per game. That reasonable factor diminishes the greater your opponent are. Some fans on here suggesting PSG is a weak team.. well. ok then. You're full of shit and you know it.
We produced more than enough chances to put this game in the bag. The players performed SO well. Missing chances like that at this level is not something you can do and get away with it. Martial owes this team a champions league point.
Going down 2-1 was yet another freak incident goal where the ball eventually landed on a PSG foot by chance. It's the worst I've felt about a game for a long time. Completely against play and probably the least deserved goal of hte CL campaign.
I would have taken Fred off. There's no discussing that. But I *get it*. We were playing too well to take anyone off. Imagine being in the middle of that partyfootball 20 minutes and you take a player off in the middle of it? No. The time to take Fred off was at 45 minutes. Subbing people on at 60 minutes would interrupt the good period of football, and you know this.
Up until the 69th minute, the game execution from the players was a solid 8 or 9 for me. We are SO dangerous when we're coming at pace. You can't do more than deliver a final ball on a foot that should score a goal. Failing that is not down to tactics, gameplan or anything. Its a big, personal mistake. We had several of those.
Even with 10 men the team took the match to PSG and still they remain lucky we do not score that 2-2 goal. The 1-3 goal at the end was a shitty moment that ultimately won't matter with regards to progressing from the group, it was 2-2 or nothing.
Leaving Fred on was a huge risk that, on a normal day from Martial, Bruno or Cavani would have paid off. But hindsight doesn't get you points, so here we are.
It's easy to be wise with facts in hand, and facts in hand say we should have taken Fred off. The game result would have been different. Mind you we could still very well have lost, or won, no one can know that and that is the point of hindsight being so easy to use in an argument.
A frequent comment I see is "I don't mind that we lose on occasion if we play well". Well, we played very well. We played very well against one of the great teams in football and can reasonably say that we should have won this.
And that makes a loss much harder to swallow rather than being outmatched. This team can beat absolutely anyone and I'm very optimistic for the Leipzig game.
It's my opinion that the players can walk away from this game with heads raised high, I'm happy with how they played. The result was bad but the performance was very good. It was just not meant to be on this day.
