Kingsley Coman returns to haunt PSG and give Bayern Munich the edge

For the last few weeks Paris has been gripped by stories of superstar players wanting to leave this place. For an hour at the Parc des Princes it was easy to sympathise as a Paris Saint-Germain team with Neymar and Lionel Messi as a sedate front two produced a horribly constipated performance en route to a home defeat by Bayern Munich that threatens to deadhead their season before the end of February.

The emir of Qatar was in Paris to watch this last-16 first leg, and presumably will have woken up for the final half-hour, when the arrival of Kylian Mbappé injected life and pace into this blue-shirted star vehicle. Otherwise Paris looked like an imitation of a team here, outplayed for long periods by a neat and competent Bayern.

Le Parisien had billed this match as “Le Grand Soir”. And for Paris Saint-Germain this Champions League tie is basically the season, a world in a grain of sand, another year of the project, ready to do or die across 180 minutes of high-jeopardy knockout football.

The Parc des Princes was a thunderous place at kick-off, although as ever with a sense of a place that is en fête, of lots of people basically singing and dancing next to a football match. Bayern went with a back three from the start, an ambitious shape that meant Kingsley Coman taking a turn as an attacking left wing-back.

For PSG, Mbappé was, as promised (by Mbappé), on the bench despite a thigh injury. “I didn’t think he was going to train,” Christophe Galtier said the day before the game, which is probably just the kind of thing you get used to around here.

In his absence PSG began with a front two of Lionel Messi and Neymar, and with a 16-year-old from the banlieue, Warren Zaïre-Emery, for their biggest game of the year. The teenager