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Back in late August 2020, when Lyon Women were winning last season’s Champions League final (to complete the treble), I was saying that PSG were going to surpass them. And that Lyon had reached the end of the line. https://twitter.com/NiostaC/status/1299947145466908672
It wasn’t that I could see the future or that I was smarter than everyone else who wasn’t saying it; it was just a matter of paying attention. The dynamics within each of the teams (Lyon Women and PSG Women) and their games were pointing to that.
PSG Women were full of young players, still to enter their primes. Because of their youth (and their brilliant head coach), their football was hungry and energetic, and they were bringing to the pitch a level of intensity that was too much for uninformed opponents.
What PSG did to Arsenal Women in the quarter-finals of that Champions League edition was something I hadn’t seen before. They broke Arsenal with raw physicality alone. That was when I understood it: things were about to change in Europe.
Pundits and fans were saying that PSG Women had broken Arsenal the way they did because the Gunners had had a long pause without football, as the pandemic was raging. But I knew what I had witnessed. That was a glimpse into the future.
PSG were not playing while Arsenal Women were at home. The pandemic had stopped the game for everyone; everybody was at home. So, I knew the pandemic wasn’t the cause to that annihilation of Arsenal. It was something else. And I saw it on the pitch that night.
What PSG Women hit Arsenal with was a revolutionary approach at playing football, unlike anything any women’s team at that point was using: physicality as a way of taking out the opponent. But they hadn’t perfected the approach yet.
Meanwhile, Lyon Women were dragging themselves through the pitches. They barely survived a Bayern Munich Women that had no structure nor plan in the quarter-finals. And defeated a PSG team that hadn’t found its balance nor the right pieces for its system yet in the semi-finals.
The core players were aging. The coach didn’t have a system. Their football wasn’t convincing. Defining their state in one sentence: they were slowly becoming a mess. Yet, they kept winning. And the winning kept dissimulating and distracting from the serious issues the team had.
A bunch of serial winners, Lyon Women players knew how to rise to the occasion. When it mattered, those women willed themselves to victory (despite their flaws – that were becoming bigger with each passing game).
That’s what they did once they reached the final. Lyon put on their best performance throughout the whole competition; and won their 5th consecutive European title. (Of course, they had a little help from their fraudulent German friends in Wolfsburg, but they deserved the win.)
Still, you can only win for so long when the problems you keep ignoring are becoming bigger and, on top of that, your rivals (PSG) are developing a revolutionary approach that is rapidly turning your approach obsolete.
When Lyon Women and PSG Women met for the first time this season, it was a total domination. PSG subjugated Lyon. And, right there and then, the change in European women’s football that the Parisian women had announced against Arsenal was consummated.
Once again, I said back then that the performance PSG Women put on in that game against Lyon Women was seminal: the dividing line between the football that had come before and the one that would come. https://twitter.com/NiostaC/status/1331672724469673984?s=19
They had finally perfected their formula. To the raw physicality shown against Arsenal Women, the Parisians had now added high-level technicality. And they had also found the right pieces to make their machine run smoothly.
The emergence of Luana Bertolucci and, above all, the growth of Sandy Baltimore’s powers were the missing parts for Olivier Echouafni’s mix of high-intensity + high-technicality football to work. With them, they wiped Lyon off the pitch – not in the scoreline, but game-wise.
PSG Women elevated what they had done against Arsenal Women to a whole new level against Lyon Women. Peak of physicality; peak of technicality; in a system that made both features work together seamlessly. And they became the best team in Europe.
Yet, some people kept saying that until Lyon Women had been knocked out of their throne, they remained the absolute queens of Europe. (And there were many others throwing around the idea that Barcelona Women were the best team in Europe.)
People argued they had seen the movie before, in which PSG defeated Lyon in a small-time game only for Lyonnais to rise again and beat the Parisians when it mattered. In a way, they were saying that the Parisian women were fraud artists.
PSG heard the naysayers, and kept improving its machine … https://twitter.com/NiostaC/status/1351239013764624384?s=19
… And improving … https://twitter.com/NiostaC/status/1353784699072745473?s=19
… Until it reached its absolute peak. https://twitter.com/NiostaC/status/1379522931303321602?s=19
What they did to Lyon Women this past Sunday finished the debates about the best team in Europe and where the game is headed. The Parisian women treated the champions of the continent as if they were a glorified French league’s bottom of the table team.
I only remember 2 chances Lyon created the whole game: the one in which Catarina Macario scored in the 4th minute and the one in which Christiane Endler instinctively and spectacularly saved a Melvine Malard shot in the 93th minute.
On the other hand, PSG could’ve easily put 6 goals on Lyon Women. They just missed them.
However, more than the chances scored or missed, the main problem was in the difference of quality between both teams.
However, more than the chances scored or missed, the main problem was in the difference of quality between both teams.
Whereas PSG Women were a bottomless well of fresh clean water, Lyon Women had no drops left, be it clean or polluted water. Even squeezing them hard, nothing came out. If you were stranded in a desert with only Lyon to get by, you’d die of thirstiness before rescue arrived.
That’s why I wasn’t surprised in the least to see the announcements of departures following their fall at PSG’s feet. They didn’t bother to wait till the end of the season to announce them because they simply recognized they can’t do shit to the Parisians in their current state.
Why pretend they’re still fighting against PSG Women with all that difference in power? It’s better to go into the league-deciding game as a team in rebuilding mode, with low expectations, get beaten up unceremoniously, and go home.
Lyon Women are not even in the list of PSG’s worries anymore. The team on the Parisians’ menu now is Barcelona. And we’re about to find out if all the talk people did about Barça being the best team in Europe had any substance or was as empty as the one before Budapest 2019.
