Real Madrid vs PSG

Farewell then, Paris, a team that for all its vaulting ambition never does seem to get past the spring. On a gripping, relentlessly noisy night at the Parc des Princes second-half goals from Cristiano Ronaldo and Casemiro were enough to extinguish once again Paris Saint‑Germain’s hopes of making it to the late stages of the Champions League.

A 5-2 aggregate victory hardly does justice to the French champions’ fine showing in the opening hour of the first leg of this tie. But the ease of Real Madrid’s ultimate victory speaks volumes not just for their own champion poise but for the difficulty of combining dreams of European dominance with the room-temperature French league.

Paris Saint-Germain 1-2 Real Madrid (agg: 2-5): Champions League – as it happened

PSG had won their last four games since that first leg in Madrid, with an aggregate score of 13-2. This, though, was something else as Madrid pranced about from the start with an alluring sure-footedness. As he often does away from home, Ronaldo led his team on from the front, unveiling a few extra tricks and flicks, puffing his chest out.
Unai Emery will fear for his future from here. By the end his team of plastic galácticos were down to 10 men and if not quite in disarray, then tamed far too easily.

As ever the Parc des Princes had been a booming, boisterous concrete cavern before kick-off, bouncing with that familiar Parisian surge of noise. It is a paradox of this cartoonishly inflated club that it has retained an authentically passionate core, both ends keeping up a relentless wall of noise throughout this game. Football is a resilient thing. You can’t kill the spirit. Not yet anyway.

“Fais nous rêver!” read the field a team crammed with attacking talent. There is something hilariously unfortunate about spending £230m on one footballer basically just so he could play in this game, only to lose him to a broken foot a week beforehand. Worse, for Emery, was the ill-fated gamble on Giovani Lo Celso in central midfield for the first leg, which was not repeated here.

For Madrid there was a moment of vertigo before the start with the news that Toni Kroos and Luka Modric had failed to make the starting 11. Lucas Vázquez and Mateo Kovacic came in, tipping the scales towards the hosts in terms of paper-value galáctico power.