PSG drama adding to Ligue 1 intrigue

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/09/2020 (2157 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Take a look at the Ligue 1 table. Or don’t. I’ll tell you what it looks like.

There’s Saint-Étienne, fresh off Wednesday’s 2-0 win away to Marseille, at the very top after three rounds with a 100 per cent record and zero goals conceded. Two points behind Sainté are Rennes, who will face third-place Monaco today in a battle of undefeated sides. Lille, also without a loss, round out the top four.

And there, in 15th spot, with only a single goal to show from their three matches, are champions Paris Saint-Germain. They finally scored a goal, and won, at home to Metz on Wednesday. Three days before that they were beaten 1-0 by Marseille in Le Clasique — a tumultuous affair in which Neymar, Leandro Paredes and Layvin Kurzawa were ejected.

All three will miss Sunday’s trip to Nice, who have won two of three, through suspension, and after picking up his own red card against Metz, Abdou-Lakhad Diallo will also remain in the capital while his teammates travel to the French Riviera.

Ligue 1, which kicked off a few weeks before its European counterparts, is showing us just how unpredictable, how topsy-turvy and how immensely entertaining this unusual 2020-21 campaign will be. And PSG, winners of three successive titles and seven of the last eight, are perhaps a preview of the pitfalls waiting for some of the continent’s biggest clubs, many of which played late into the summer both domestically and in the continental competitions.

Those four suspensions, for example, are as much the products of fatigue and frustration as competitiveness and animosity. Nerves are frayed. Bodies are tired.

Look up and down the squad list for Sunday and you’ll also see Juan Bernat, who suffered an ACL injury against Metz and will miss the next few months as a result. Thilo Kehrer and Marco Verratti are also doubtful through injury, although their returns are certainly more imminent than Bernat’s.

Then there’s Kylian Mbappé, who contracted COVID-19 during the brief off-season and has yet to play this term. Marquinhos and Mauro Icardi were also in isolation after being infected and only made their debuts on Wednesday.

Could the seemingly invincible Parisiens lose yet another match before the calendar turns into Ligue 1’s second month? If they’ve already been defeated by Lens, then why not?

Oh, and the players are reportedly turning on manager Thomas Tuchel, whose own limp, which he picked up after spraining an ankle during training last month, is a fitting representation of his team.

Of course, it won’t only be PSG who struggle through a schedule packed full of matches.

Remember Liverpool’s entertaining 4-3 win at home to promoted Leeds last weekend? Yes, the West Yorkshire outfit made things interesting by engaging in positive, attacking play, but their success in the attacking third also had a lot to do with the reigning Premier League champions’ mental exhaustion in defense. We’ll see how the Reds manage at Chelsea on Sunday.

Things are also bound to get even more tumultuous in La Liga, which has already been through an off-season that nearly had Lionel Messi leaving Barcelona. He ended up staying, and scored a cracker in a recent friendly against Girona, but Luis Suarez will shortly leave the club and an administrative mess has left both former manager Quique Setien and incoming boss Ronald Koeman in limbo. Meanwhile, president Josep Maria Bartomeu is facing a confidence vote after a petition demanding his resignation gained the requisite number of signatures.

Don’t forget, the chaos at Camp Nou was brought about by that 8-2 drubbing by Bayern Munich in the Champions League’s Lisbon tournament — a play-off that was, itself, necessitated by the coronavirus and jammed between the end of the previous, elongated domestic schedule and the start of a new, compressed campaign.

Bayern, though the worthiest of champions, are not six goals better than Barcelona, and you feel the Catalan giants might have taken a deep, reflective breath and chalked up the defeat to the unprecedented circumstances the pandemic required instead of breaking out into existential panic.

That said, when one of Barcelona and Real Madrid are in utter disarray the entire division takes on a different look, and that will certainly be the case this time around.

Because of COVID-19, whether directly through infection or indirectly through scheduling, well near every team in every league on every continent will be faced with something they hadn’t expected in the coming months.

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Managers will struggle to properly plan their training sessions and motivate their players and will be sacked as a result. Players will be injured as the matches come thick and fast and they’re forced to play through niggling knocks that might have otherwise had them among the substitutes. Others will request transfers out of clubs that never got a grasp of the situation.

Matches will swing on cooling breaks that interrupt momentum. Energy and impetus will be affected by empty or partially-filled stadiums. There will be improbable upsets, dramatic finishes and even unlikely champions.

We’re in for quite the season, folks.

jerradpeters@gmail.com

Twitter @JerradPeters