Laurent Blanc: Taming egos at PSG

Laurent Blanc: Taming egos at PSG

By Nicol Hay

It had been 72 very Paris Saint German minutes.

The French Super Cup was in full swing in Libreville, Gabon – and the Parisians were doing their best impression of the worst of themselves: diffident, lazy, and unwilling to match the effort of an opponent whose collective wage would struggle to buy Edinson Cavani’s soul patch. Any energy expended by PSG in that opening period was focused solely on glowering at each other as every player decided that winning this game was someone else’s job.

Laurent Blanc doesn’t like lazy though. Or diffident (his opinion on soul patches remains unrecorded). The man who was charged with purging the prima donnas from Les Bleus finds himself charged with the same task in Paris – like a Red Adair of French football, on constant standby to wade in and rescue a failing dressing room. So with the match disappearing down the vortex of ego and shrugs that have characterized the Qatar-era at PSG, Blanc rolled up his sleeves and made a statement. A statement in two parts.

Part One: he made a triple-substitution. Normally the last act of desperate man, a rarely seen hail-Mary toss from the dugout, the triple-substitution is a clear way of saying “Sorry, Plan A was bobbins.” It’s a rash move on a number of levels, not least because it leaves the manager no recourse to change again if Plan B turns out to be less than inspired. Furthermore, going maximum sub means that a third of your outfield is now trying to catch themselves up to the pace of game against a fully-functional opponent who has just been buoyed by watching you perform the footballing equivalent of kicking over the drawing board and setting fire to the pencils.

Part Two: Blanc used two-thirds of his nuclear-option substitution to remove €70m-worth of Argentine internationals and replace them with two teenagers who had previously played six minutes of competitive first-team football between them.

And it worked.

With those two teenagers – Kinsley Coman and Hervin Ongenda – now running the wings with the determination that can only really come when you’re competing with a world-famous millionaire for the right to keep your job, Marco Verratti could sit on top of the PSG defence, collect the ball, and then teleport it at will to any location on the pitch.

Within five minutes, Zlatan Imbrahimović had turned his death-stare away from his teammates and towards the linesman who had incorrectly flagged off the Swede’s onside header. Within ten minutes, PSG equalised with a beautiful team goal; sweeping upfield on the break, Lucas arcing a wonderful ball over the defence to find Zlatan, who dinked the assist into the path of Ongenda, who then volleyed home without breaking stride.

It was a goal born of a continuing escalation of excellence – world-class athletes upping the ‘most gifted’ ante with each successive movement, only to be trumped by an 18 year-old so unheralded he earned a story in the next day’s L’Equipe headlined, “Ongenda, who is that?”

PSG’s winner came deep into injury time, lofted on a cloud of pure irony. Bordeaux had moments earlier tried to waste precious minutes with a triple-substitution of their own, and were bitten by the downside of changing a defensive scheme en masse. Lucas pinged a deep free kick onto Alex, who took advantage of the cold and confused marking to leap several miles into the air to power home the type of header that Vikings wrote sagas about.

It seems clear that Blanc’s brave move was more about sending a message than making an incisive tactical move to win the game. Super Cups are all well and good, but occupy a nebulous evolutionary stage between preseason friendly and competition proper. Much more important than lifting this trophy was letting the squad know that Blanc is a manger unafraid to bench a big name, no matter how many shoulders that name may be displayed across in the stands.

This is doubly important for Blanc, who despite his tenure with the national team and reputation for discipline, was publicly acknowledged as the third choice for this job. Trying to impose your will on a staff who are all-too aware that the owners aren’t afraid to scapegoat a coach is one thing – trying to do it when everyone assumes you are simply marking time until Arsène Wenger can finally be persuaded to throw his principles onto a pile of burning kruggerrands is another.

To be fair to Lavezzi and Pastore – the Argentines displaced by Blanc’s gamble on youth – they stayed on the touchline and looked genuinely delighted at the team’s performance. The cynic might say there’s every chance that they’ve been so damaged by their time at a petroclub that the thought of picking up their wages while someone else does the work has become their ideal scenario – but lets stick with the idea that Blanc is on the road to finally turning PSG’s nightclub VIP lounge of a dressing room into an actual functioning football team.

This piece was written by Nicol Hay, who you can follow on Twitter at @NicolHay. Comments below please.