One of the referee’s assistants finished his night’s work with a broken flag. The most expensive attacking partnership ever put together by a football club reflected once again on a broken dream.
Neymar and Kylian Mbappe, €400 million worth of Paris Saint-Germain investment, have known too many European Champions League eliminations not to wonder if the near-misses are part of a chronic problem.
Not long after the final whistle had blown on a surreal night at the Bernabeu stadium, where Real Madrid had, in the space of Karim Benzema’s 17-minute, second-half hat-trick erased a 2-0 PSG advantage, the referee Danny Makkiele and his assistants were paid a visit in their dressing-room.
According to the match official’s report, so angry and confrontational was the delegation led by Paris Saint-Germain’s president, Nasser Al Khelaifi, that a linesman’s flag was vandalised, amid hot-tempered insults directed at the refereeing team.
Uefa, organisers of the competition, may impose a sanction, on senior PSG executives and on manager Mauricio Pochettino for his angry remarks about the refereeing of the see-saw second leg of the tie. Pochettino claimed his goalkeeper, Gigio Donnarumma, had been fouled by Benzema in the immediate build-up to the first Madrid goal. “What was VAR doing?” asked Pochettino. “It was a clear foul and that goal changed the game.”
PSG are developing quite a reputation for angry exits. Three seasons ago, at the same stage in the Champions League, Neymar was among those enraged at the award of a penalty, for a perceived handball by PSG’s Presnel Kimpembe late in a tie against Manchester United. Neymar, absent from the pitch with injury, still made noisy enough criticism of the officials that he picked up a four-match ban.
Behind the rage there is a pattern. PSG, who came under the wealthy patronage of their Qatari backers 11 years ago, keep spending big and keep squandering positions of advantage in high-stakes matches in the competition that matters most to their owners and their ambitious president.
On the night Neymar lost his composure, United’s Marcus Rashford converted the late penalty and conjured a remarkable late comeback. United had finished the first leg at Old Trafford trailing 2-0. They went to Paris, scored twice either side of Bernat’s goal for PSG, but only when Rashford converted the spot-kick in the fourth minute of stoppage time did United hold a lead across the entire two legs.
Rewind further, to the most famous European collapse of the modern era. In 2016-17, PSG met Barcelona for a place in the Champions League quarter-finals. They walloped them 4-0 in Paris. They also scored an away goal in the second leg at Camp Nou. Yet still they ended up eliminated, Barca’s sixth and decisive goal scored after 94 minutes by Sergi Roberto.
There’s more. How about the quarter-finals of the 2013-14 competition, when the PSG of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Edinson Cavani and Thiago Silva took on Chelsea? The Paris leg set them up with a 3-1 lead. Up until the 87th minute of the London leg, they were holding a 3-2 aggregate advantage. Enter Demba Ba with a very late Chelsea goal, turfing out the French champions via the away-goals rule.
Ba. Sergi Roberto. Rashford. Now Benzema, who in the 78th minute on Wednesday completed a hat-trick he had started on the hour.
First, Donnarumma was panicked by Benzema’s pressing - pressure Pochettino thought was too physical to be legal - into giving away the ball for goal No 1. The ease with which Luka Modric carved through PSG’s soft middle gave Madrid the impetus for Benzema’s second. Only a shell-shocked opponent could look quite in such disarray as PSG were when they almost immediately conceded the third Benzema goal.
“Once the team conceded the first goal, with that sense of injustice, we were vulnerable because of our own mistakes over the next ten or 15 minutes,” acknowledged Pochettino. “We didn’t know how to deal with it.”
It is unlikely Pochettino will still be in charge when PSG, well on course to win France’s Ligue 1, embark on their next European campaign, in September. Mbappe may well have moved on by then too, probably to Madrid.
His decision about which direction to go to best serve his ambitions when his current contract - which PSG want to extend - may even have been clarified by the trajectory of the Paris club in Europe.
In 2020 PSG were finalists, for the first time in their history, in the Champions League. Last season, when Pochettino took over from Thomas Tuchel, they were losing semi-finalists. In 2022, they have fallen shy of the last eight thanks to half an hour of meltdown, ahead of some red mist behind the scenes.
Paatal Lok season two
Directors: Avinash Arun, Prosit Roy
Stars: Jaideep Ahlawat, Ishwak Singh, Lc Sekhose, Merenla Imsong
Rating: 4.5/5
How to protect yourself when air quality drops
Install an air filter in your home.
Close your windows and turn on the AC.
Shower or bath after being outside.
Wear a face mask.
Stay indoors when conditions are particularly poor.
If driving, turn your engine off when stationary.
Iran's dirty tricks to dodge sanctions
There’s increased scrutiny on the tricks being used to keep commodities flowing to and from blacklisted countries. Here’s a description of how some work.
1 Going Dark
A common method to transport Iranian oil with stealth is to turn off the Automatic Identification System, an electronic device that pinpoints a ship’s location. Known as going dark, a vessel flicks the switch before berthing and typically reappears days later, masking the location of its load or discharge port.
2. Ship-to-Ship Transfers
A first vessel will take its clandestine cargo away from the country in question before transferring it to a waiting ship, all of this happening out of sight. The vessels will then sail in different directions. For about a third of Iranian exports, more than one tanker typically handles a load before it’s delivered to its final destination, analysts say.
3. Fake Destinations
Signaling the wrong destination to load or unload is another technique. Ships that intend to take cargo from Iran may indicate their loading ports in sanction-free places like Iraq. Ships can keep changing their destinations and end up not berthing at any of them.
4. Rebranded Barrels
Iranian barrels can also be rebranded as oil from a nation free from sanctions such as Iraq. The countries share fields along their border and the crude has similar characteristics. Oil from these deposits can be trucked out to another port and documents forged to hide Iran as the origin.
* Bloomberg
War
Director: Siddharth Anand
Cast: Hrithik Roshan, Tiger Shroff, Ashutosh Rana, Vaani Kapoor
Rating: Two out of five stars
India squad for fourth and fifth Tests
Kohli (c), Dhawan, Rahul, Shaw, Pujara, Rahane (vc), Karun, Karthik (wk), Pant (wk), Ashwin, Jadeja, Pandya, Ishant, Shami, Umesh, Bumrah, Thakur, Vihari
The 100 Best Novels in Translation
Boyd Tonkin, Galileo Press
NYBL PROFILE
Company name: Nybl
Date started: November 2018
Founder: Noor Alnahhas, Michael LeTan, Hafsa Yazdni, Sufyaan Abdul Haseeb, Waleed Rifaat, Mohammed Shono
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: Software Technology / Artificial Intelligence
Initial investment: $500,000
Funding round: Series B (raising $5m)
Partners/Incubators: Dubai Future Accelerators Cohort 4, Dubai Future Accelerators Cohort 6, AI Venture Labs Cohort 1, Microsoft Scale-up
Omar Yabroudi's factfile
Born: October 20, 1989, Sharjah
Education: Bachelor of Science and Football, Liverpool John Moores University
2010: Accrington Stanley FC, internship
2010-2012: Crystal Palace, performance analyst with U-18 academy
2012-2015: Barnet FC, first-team performance analyst/head of recruitment
2015-2017: Nottingham Forest, head of recruitment
2018-present: Crystal Palace, player recruitment manager
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Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Profile
Name: Carzaty
Founders: Marwan Chaar and Hassan Jaffar
Launched: 2017
Employees: 22
Based: Dubai and Muscat
Sector: Automobile retail
Funding to date: $5.5 million
Tips to keep your car cool
- Place a sun reflector in your windshield when not driving
- Park in shaded or covered areas
- Add tint to windows
- Wrap your car to change the exterior colour
- Pick light interiors - choose colours such as beige and cream for seats and dashboard furniture
- Avoid leather interiors as these absorb more heat
South Africa squad
Faf du Plessis (captain), Hashim Amla, Temba Bavuma, Quinton de Kock (wicketkeeper), Theunis de Bruyn, AB de Villiers, Dean Elgar, Heinrich Klaasen (wicketkeeper), Keshav Maharaj, Aiden Markram, Morne Morkel, Wiaan Mulder, Lungi Ngidi, Vernon Philander and Kagiso Rabada.
MATCH INFO
Uefa Champions League semi-final, second leg result:
Ajax 2-3 Tottenham
Tottenham advance on away goals rule after tie ends 3-3 on aggregate
Final: June 1, Madrid
Retail gloom
Online grocer Ocado revealed retail sales fell 5.7 per cen in its first quarter as customers switched back to pre-pandemic shopping patterns.
It was a tough comparison from a year earlier, when the UK was in lockdown, but on a two-year basis its retail division, a joint venture with Marks&Spencer, rose 31.7 per cent over the quarter.
The group added that a 15 per cent drop in customer basket size offset an 11.6. per cent rise in the number of customer transactions.
The winners
Fiction
- ‘Amreekiya’ by Lena Mahmoud
- ‘As Good As True’ by Cheryl Reid
The Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Award
- ‘Syrian and Lebanese Patricios in Sao Paulo’ by Oswaldo Truzzi; translated by Ramon J Stern
- ‘The Sound of Listening’ by Philip Metres
The George Ellenbogen Poetry Award
- ‘Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance’ by Fady Joudah
Children/Young Adult
- ‘I’ve Loved You Since Forever’ by Hoda Kotb
