PSG: “We always come back to the same question… who will score Mbappé’s goals?” asks Omar Da Fonseca

Girona, he knows it. Last year and again this season, Omar Da Fonseca watched and commentated on Michel’s men’s matches in La Liga for BeIN Sports on numerous occasions. But against PSG, the former player had imagined that there would be no surprises and that the capital club would win by a wide margin. Against a modest Spanish team, the Parisian performance (1-0 victory) led him to question the performances of the midfielders who were unable to animate the game and the effectiveness of an attack without a Mbappé who was making the counters turn.

What do you think of the PSG match?

OMAR OF FONSECA. Paris was playing against a team that did not meet any criteria of Champions League teams: experience, maturity of the players, individual quality of the players. Today, Girona is a very modest team because the five best players from last season have left, so we expect in this kind of match that the difference will be made much more quickly. And that was not the case. At the end of the match, we have a kind of relief while Paris has just beaten Girona who were in pot 4 in the draw and are completely weakened. We have this mixed feeling. I have seen this Catalan team play twice since the start of the season and it has nothing to do with last season. Basically, I had said to myself that PSG would win 3-0.

When you win, you are right because you always have the arguments to say that we will do better. I say it every time, the Paris midfield is too much in the application. It lacks inspiration, intuition. In the first half, there is no player who makes the connection like players like Bernardo Silva or Dani Olmo can do and who has superior technical quality. After the word worried, it is too early. But the question is whether these players will and can do better. The victory is deserved because Paris had more chances but we always come back to the same question: who will score Mbappé’s goals?

“If we think that Dembélé will score fifteen goals, it’s not true”

Does this team miss a star like Mbappe in the Champions League?

Yes, yes, yes, obviously! He is missing because there is no player with his statistics. If we think that Dembélé will score fifteen goals, it is not true. If we believe that Barcola will do as much, I have doubts and Kolo Muani we do not know if he will play often. Today there is a deficit. We give too much responsibility to the attackers who are basically wingers and we cannot expect them to go and cut to the near post on a cross or a corner. Dembélé has an incredible opportunity on the counterattack but today the significance of the Paris match is that to win matches against teams that are not going to leave much space, I believe that Paris will have difficulties.

We have praised this PSG a lot, have we been mistaken about the true current level of this team?

We weren’t wrong but this match has opened some doubts about the superiority of this team. Opposite, there is a modest, fragile team but in the first half, there is a moment where PSG is pushed around. In the middle, Vitinha is not a ball-scraper, Ruiz is not a rag-picker, a guy who will tackle. They are elegant players, who like to get the ball out. Opposite, there was Oriol Romeu, who is slow, Van de Beek who has not played for over a year, Martin, the little left-hander and the three of them made soup in the first half. I am not saying that Paris should be worried nevertheless against a team much less important than those it will meet in the future, it showed many deficiencies. Obviously Luis Enrique will ask himself many questions and it will be necessary to find solutions. I don’t know if within the group, built as it is, there are all the solutions to become the PSG that we want.

Barcola and Dembélé are the men in form in L1, how do you explain that they stalled in the Champions League?

The smaller the space, the less big it becomes Barcola. He needs that. Dembélé, imagine if he takes all the chances he gets. If there is a guy who can be said to never get tired and who is in a kind of permanent challenge against his mistakes, it is him. Sometimes, he must wonder how he misses when he feints, he provokes, he wins duels, falls back and runs a lot more. He is criticized for his flaws but I fall in love with his qualities and I continue to say that he remains an exceptional player. Today, we are in a situation where he is the number 1 person responsible for scoring goals but he does not have the ability to be more axial like Mbappé was. He is a wing guy, a real specialist in the right left, we cannot expect him to score number 9 goals either. If we hope that he scores fifteen goals, we are in too great a desire.