Manchester United has a solid match and beats PSG 1-2 in the Champions League!

Yesterday I was able to watch this match between United and PSG and I must say it was worth it but I was expecting so much more from Neymar and Mbappe and their defeat was deserved.

PSG was clearly the favorite team, last season they won all 4 French trophies and they reached the Champions League final where they were fairly defeated by Bayern Munich. PSG has 2 of the best strikers in the world, the aforementioned Neymar and Mbappe, as well as a top-level goalkeeper and great players in both the defense and the midfielder.

Manchester United isn't a bad team, it certainly has a lot of historic victories but for the past several years their squad has been decreasing in quality, and right now they are far from being considered one of the best. So much so, that last year their European participation ended up being in the Europa League tournament, which is a lesser competition than the Champions League.

One of the good things about football, is that even if a bad team is going through a rough time, or if a team is simply inferior to its rivals, it is still possible for anyone to win. Anything can happen in 90 minutes and the weekend matches with Real Madrid and Barcelona were good proof, they both lost against inferior teams. Yesterday, Manchester United had a very good match and were able to beat PSG in their own stadium!

What's more, if United's strikers, Martial and Rashford, were better, they could have scored at least 2 more goals. Keylar Navas, PSG's goalkeeper, had a wonderful match and he even stopped a penalty but the referee ordered the repetition of the penalty and he couldn't stop the second try. Navas was the best player for his team.

Neymar participated in a lot of plays and he tried several times to create a danger to De Gea but was mostly unable to produce anything of value. PSG's goal was actually an own goal from Martial after Neymar crossed the ball and Martial's header went inside rather than outside. Neymar also tried to dribble the rival defense but he appeared to be very tired because he was walking most of the time and dribbling players while walking is almost impossible. It was like if he wanted to save as much energy as possible and this affected his performance.

I didn't like Mbappe's match. He had 1 good shot that was stopped with a tremendous save by De Gea and little more. The best moment for PSG was at the beginning of the second half, they were already losing and had 45 minutes to either tie or win the match and they went all in. They only managed to tie the match but in the end, Rashford had an awesome individual play and gave the victory back to his team with the best goal of the night. PSG was completely focused on attacking and several times they left their defense with not enough players. It was a brave decision from Tuchel to apply this change of strategy but they risk it and well, they ended up paying the risk with United's second goal.

This defeat shouldn't affect the chances of PSG going to the round of 16 but this does affect their chances of being the first of the group. This was just the first match though, 5 more to go for them.

In a few hours, I will be watching Real Madrid vs Shakhtar and then Atletico de Madrid vs Bayern Munich.

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