“An accident,” Mauricio Pochettino called it, and the Paris Saint-Germain head coach is right that these slip-ups happen seldom to PSG, where he took over as head coach a month ago.
He came in with the club third in a league they have won seven times in the last eight seasons. They are still third, left sitting three points off the summit by Sunday's 'accident', a 3-2 defeat at Lorient.
That’s a Lorient who went into the game joint-bottom of Ligue 1, which makes the defeat perhaps the unlikeliest to befall the serial French champions since …. well, since Dijon upset PSG 15 months ago. Or perhaps since Guingamp knocked PSG out of the Cup two years ago by scoring twice, from 1-0 down, in the last 10 minutes.
These sorts of defeats are rare enough that PSG historians could point out that it had been 10 years since the team squandered a comeback in the league. Lorient had opened the scoring and the visitors scored the next two goals before conceding twice after the 80th minute.
But it was not quite so unprecedented, which is why French sports newspaper L'Equipe identified, as a recurring trait, the club's "misplaced superiority complex".
Thomas Tuchel, sacked as head coach in late December, had glimpsed it from time to time. Four losses, including the season opener at newly-promoted Lens, in the first 17 games of the campaign were part of the reason he was shown the door.
Pochettino’s record, his style, and naturally his ability to have the club’s attacking superstars playing in fluent harmony will inevitably be measured against Tuchel’s standards.
Under Tuchel, PSG won all three domestic trophies in a shortened 2019/20 and reached the Champions League final for the first time in the club’s history.
Pochettino, who led Tottenham Hotspur to their first ever Champions League final shortly before being sacked there, has overseen three Ligue 1 victories over his first month, one draw, at Saint Etienne, and now his first defeat.
The concern is that after Wednesday's hosting of bottom-of-the-table Nimes – a match-up to invite a superiority complex – the second month of the Poch era looks considerably trickier.
It includes a ‘classique’ at Marseille, who are short of form but always motivated against PSG; the hosting of Monaco, three points behind PSG in the table; and a trip to Barcelona in the Champions League last 16.
Pochettino has a clear idea already of who his key allies are. PSG missed the injured goalkeeper Keylor Navas and captain Marquinhos at Lorient because of injury, and midfielder Marco Verratti was beginning a period of self-isolation because of a positive coronavirus test.
Though he was not pointing fingers at individuals who came into their positions, Pochettino did say: “We must be able to manage when certain players are missing. Absences cannot be an excuse.”
Not least when the so-called ‘Fantastic Four’ are all available at the front end of the team. Neymar and Kylian Mbappe, the pair who between them cost €400m ($481m), were both in the line-up at Lorient, a club who climbed up from Ligue 2 last year on a budget of €25m. So were Mauro Icardi, and Angel Di Maria.
Between them, the quartet managed no goals in open play, though Icardi did win the second of the two penalties Neymar converted. The prolific Mbappe’s radar seems unusually wonky.
The France international has only found the net in one of the six matches, across competitions, he has played under the new head coach, and that was when he was facing a Montpellier side reduced to 10 men.
“Against Lorient, we didn’t get into the rhythm of the game, which is disappointing,” acknowledged Pochettino, who told his players they had been “too slow in the transitions.”
On Monday, Pochettino saw one possible route to smoothing the channels between midfield and attack disappear. He had been keen on taking Dele Alli, with whom he worked successfully at Spurs, on loan for the rest of the season. Tottenham blocked the move, even though Dele is featuring very little in Spurs manager Jose Mourinho’s starting XI.
