Team Focus: With or Without Zlatan, PSG Face a Mountain against Barcelona

Ever since the draw was made in Monaco, Zlatan Ibrahimovic might conceivably have had this Tuesday marked in his diary in red pen. ‘8.45 pm. Prove Barcelona wrong, Parc des Princes.’ What he wouldn’t have been expecting is to have to silence a few dissenters closer to home.

At first consideration, the very thought seems preposterous. Ibrahimovic celebrates his 33rd birthday on Friday, but there’s no sense of him tailing off. In fact, he’s never been stronger. After 26 Ligue 1 goals and 11 assists last season brought his total in two seasons with Paris Saint-Germain to 56 and 19, he has begun this campaign with 5 goals in 5 matches.

Yet with PSG in undeniably sluggish form – Saturday’s draw at Toulouse was their fourth in the last five games of an admittedly still-unbeaten season – the talisman’s role has started to come under the spotlight. It is no news that everything flows through Ibrahimovic, with Javier Pastore recently remarking that when playing in his favoured number 10 role, he sometimes find himself “treading on his toes,” so “I have to find a way to play around him.”

In the wake of Saturday’s match, Blanc hinted at the ideological conflict, when discussing Ibrahimovic’s prospects of recovery for Tuesday’s Champions League showdown with Barça. “You have to be patient,” the coach said, sounding doubtful over his man’s participation. “It’s always something to consider, because we don’t play in the same way with or without Ibra.”

That shadow has been hanging over the squad heavily since the Champions League opener with Ajax. The plan had been to switch to 4-4-2 to make PSG’s game a little more dynamic, with Pastore at the tip of a midfield diamond and Edinson Cavani joining Ibrahimovic in a front pair. Except the latter was widely reported to be quite lukewarm on the idea, so Blanc stuck with 4-3-3 (Lucas Moura on the right, Cavani on the left, either side of Ibrahimovic) and it was a damp squib. PSG let a lead – and a commanding position in the game – slip to the extent that Ajax ended up with 51% of possession in the match. In last season’s competition, only Bayern Munich and Barcelona had a greater percentage of the ball than Blanc’s side.

Quite apart from his indisputable quality, the last week has shown that PSG’s current malaise is bigger – believe it or not – than Ibrahimovic. They have played twice without him, in two different systems, and the results may surprise some. While they swept to a fine win at Caen on Wednesday in a 4-3-3, they produced one of their poorest matches of the season at Le Stadium on Saturday in that long-mooted 4-4-2.

The diamond midfield has become en vogue in France over the last year or so, so one of its principal drawbacks should be clear. Full-backs have to get through a lot of work, not just being charged with adding to the attack, but in the sense that they tend to have defend with limited protection. There was a reminder of that in the first 10 minutes at Toulouse when the returning Serge Aurier, given the hurry-up, sent an inaccurate backpass in the direction of Salvatore Sirigu. The sprightly Wissam Ben Yedder mopped up, rounded the Italian and opened the scoring. Perhaps trying out the system against Toulouse, one of the few sides in France to play with three at the back and wing-backs, was not the wisest move. All in all, Les Violets made 74% of their attacks against PSG down the flanks (compared to the away side’s more balanced 31% right, 30% middle and 38% left). 

In the shuffle between Wednesday and Saturday, Blanc made six changes, with one of the most significant being the restoration of Marco Verratti to the XI in place of Thiago Motta. Verratti was charged, in the different midfield shape, with being the lone deep lying player. It worked to some extent, with his pass from a typical regista area of the pitch being finished off by Jean-Christophe Bahebeck for the equaliser. 

Verratti is more mobile than Motta but lacks of control of tempo. The younger Italian landed 84% of his passes at Toulouse and is an injudicious enough tackler – picking up another yellow card at Le Stadium for a bad foul – to almost negate the fact that he’s quicker around the turf. Motta, incidentally, completed 95% of passes in his 134 touches at Caen.

Received wisdom in Paris has become that for the team to become more expansive, one of the deeper midfielders has to be ditched. This theory assumes that David Luiz will also participate in the build-up from further back, though he had another uncomfortable match. 

The Brazilian himself admitted post-match that he is only “at 60%” at the moment, and also remarked that “I’m trying to get by on the pitch using my brain alone”, a worrying prospect for those who see him as an erratic decision-maker. Whatever your view, his distribution wasn’t up to being that pre-playmaker type in Toulouse. He hit his target with a relatively low 83% of his passes, below the rate of his rather more rudimentary partner Zoumana Camara (85%). 

The player who could really have added attacking verve in Haute-Garonne was Lucas Moura, fresh from an outstanding performance in midweek. He didn’t enter the match until the 72nd minute, when Blanc also elected to take off Cavani, the only authentic top-level goalscorer in the side, as he reconstituted a front three. Lucas received a WhoScored rating of 10 in the Caen match, in which he opened the scoring and contributed 2 further key passes. Pastore, for whom the midfield diamond was presumably convened, had thrived on the right of a midfield three in that game.

So it looks like neither Pastore, nor Ibrahimovic, is the problem as PSG try to drag themselves out of their current torpor. This time, quite rightly, all the questions are being asked of Blanc. The biggest one is to come on Tuesday night in front of a full house.

Do you think PSG can get a result against Barcelona on Tuesday? Let us know in the comments below