Paris Saint Germain 1-0 Real Madrid

Celebrating Mbappe's great goal.

First round of this pair, PSG has yet to win anything out of France, but even before the game started they were favorites against Real Madrid. As I expected PSG immediately went on the attack and during the first half had Real Madrid in their half, except for a few sporadic attacks Real Madrid showed nothing apparently basing their entire strategy on not conceding a goal.

The second half during 35 minutes was the mirror image of the first half, all PSG, who even had Messi miss a penalty. Here I have to make a point, Messi has a lousy penalty record with less than 80% effectiveness, doesn't PSG have a better penalty kicker? He is also not that good in free kicks but he still kicks them, I think he is a great player still but come on, you have to have your best kicker take these shots. After he missed the penalty Messi actually played better, probably trying to make up for it.

But it seemed nothing could be done to break the tie, in fact after the 80 minute things evened out and Real Madrid looked more aggressive, I actually thought they would win the game in the last minutes. But PSG entered Neymar and in the last 30 seconds he gave Mbappe an impressive pass, and frankly Mbappe made an even more impressive move to score PSG's winning goal.

A very well deserved win by PSG, but man with that attack they have they should be scoring a lot more goals. The return game should be good, Real will have to leave more spaces in defense, perhaps PSG will at last take advantage of that.