For 30 first-half minutes [Manchester City were] oddly fearful and muddled.
I would not have found that odd. During the quarterfinals against Dortmund I heard the play-by-play guy say that after City fell behind 1-0 players could be heard "barking" instructions to each other. The players know the Champions League is the only thing left to be achieved. More, they know it is by far--far--the most important thing to Sheikh Mansour and Pep.
...City – led by an alpha-dog performance from Kevin De Bruyne in central, right, left midfield, and pretty much every other position on the pitch [dominated].
KDB was that way against Dortmund, too. He seems especially aware of the importance of winning the Champions League this year.
Guardiola has a history of flinching a little too much on these occasions.
Guardiola had picked his simplest, strongest team. Happily this meant going full Pep, with no orthodox striker, but with the familiar bounty of nimble-footed midfielders. [Pep and Erik Spoelstra were separated at birth.] Still, though, something was off here.
Paris pressed hard, suffocating the spaces for City’s dainty, pirouetting inside-forwards. Worse, the full-backs had been pinned back.
I reprint below simply in appreciation of exquisite descriptive writing. Neymar does seem like this at these times.
...City looked tongue-tied and forgetful, a team wandering around with its glasses on its forehead trying to remember what it was looking for. Neymar was sublime in those moments. There was a pinged, stunned, back-spun pass. There was a ludicrous playground-style dribble, moving like a pond-skater. At times like these Neymar seems to move with a kind of light around him, working on insect-time, able to see space, angles, movement that much quicker than every other person on the pitch.
Two things happened to turn the game on its head...the full-backs began to play, wings unclipped, given the oxygen to do what they normally do. João Cancelo in particular became a sword instead of a shield, allowed to occupy that outside-right position until he left the pitch after an hour, in response to a first-half yellow card.
Secondly De Bruyne decided to pull himself up...De Bruyne was utterly commanding...
In the space of one Parisian lull, one switch of the full-backs’ starting position...Neymar vanished completely from this earthly plane.
He did. As did Mbappe. At least Neymar had minutes in the first half when he looked dangerous, frightfully so. Mbappe never so.
