Brilliant but brittle PSG look better placed to scale Europe’s summit

The talk from Paris will be about the pass. And it should be said, the pass really was a thing of beauty, a moment all of its own, spinning in space.

Four minutes and 50 seconds had passed at the Parc des Princes when Neymar sniped inside from the left, fed the ball to Kylian Mbappé, then made just enough of an angle, peeping around the side of Adrian Rabiot, to take it back 40 yards from goal

The Juventus backline was still tightly stitched. But Mbappé had managed to find that run where he drags his marker away from goal, opening up the channel behind. And nobody runs into an open channel quite like Mbappé. Yes. Come into my place.

Neymar knows this pattern too, knows to thread the ball into that space. Although here he did something different: facing diagonally away from goal, feeling the geometry of the run, the moving objects ahead of him, and just sending it up into the lights, a moon ball, a lovely, delicate thing, freezing the moment, then drifting down out of that open sky into the path of Mbappé, who took it with a flourish, a note of pleasure in the contact with the outside of his right foot, zinging the ball with startling power into the far corner.

Mbappé and Neymar cooking