Lionel Messi back on familiar turf hoping to inflict more damage on Real Madrid

As afternoon turned to evening in the capital of Spain on Tuesday, Lionel Messi disembarked the Paris Saint-Germain team bus for practice at a stadium he knows like the back of his hand. But he noted how Real Madrid’s Bernabeu has changed since the last time he was in action there, two years ago.

Some of the sleek upgrades in an extensive remodelling of the famous venue are already visible. Others are work in progress, and with capacity still restricted to 60,000, Messi may tonight detect a different atmosphere to what he became used to over 15 years journeying at least once a season to raucous fixtures at Real Madrid in the jersey of their main rivals, Barcelona.

He inflicted a great deal of damage on Madrid over the course of those trips, although his impact tailed off in Barca’s recent years of decline. Messi scored the last of 15 goals at the Bernabeu in 2017. His first game there for PSG, who he joined last August, would be a fine time to break a four-match drought at the home of Real Madrid.

At stake is a place in the last eight of the Champions League. With a 1-0 lead from the opening leg in Paris three weeks ago, PSG carry a narrow advantage into the Bernabeu. Messi more than anybody knows it ought to be more on the balance of a first leg where PSG set the tempo. He had a penalty saved before Kylian Mbappe struck the evening’s only, late goal.

Neymar is back from the ankle problem that restricted him to a substitutes’ role in the first leg, and eager to reacquaint himself with a Bernabeu he also knows intimately. Not only from his four years as a Barcelona player, but from childhood. In 2006, the Brazilian was in Madrid as a boy, completing forms to register at Real’s academy. The arrangement fell through. In