‘What they think is what we think, to go through’ – Ancelotti ready for PSG test

“What Mbappé thinks is what Benzema thinks, which is what Vinicius thinks, which is what Messi thinks,” Carlo Ancelotti said, pretty much saying it all, or at least trying to. And he hadn’t named half of them yet, the list lengthening a few minutes later even without citing Neymar when he added Marco Verratti, Ángel Di María and Mauro Icardi.

“If you start to think about the names, you’ll lose your head,” he noted, looking for all the world like a man who never loses his, just happy to be there. “It’s better to think about what we will do.” The point Ancelotti was trying to make is that, strip it all away and there is a football match to play: one delivered by a dodgy draw, neither club happy with the result when it was redone, and one that he said “could easily be the final.”

This is the trophy that Paris Saint-Germain have been “waiting 50 years to win” in the words of their coach Mauricio Pochettino, while Madrid have who won it 13 times and have come to consider their own, even as they seek to break from it. This matters for very different reasons but the aim is the same.

“What they all think,” Ancelotti concluded, “is what we all think: to go through.” And nothing else. The prize, the game itself, provides all the focus any of them need, at least that’s the theory. Attention was drawn to whether Benzema will be fit to play after three weeks out – “I will have to see how I train now; I always ‘force’ for my team,” he said. To whether Neymar, who can seem like the eternal absentee at this stage, will be fully fit having not played this year.

And even to whether Gareth Bale may play too, an unexpected alternative to Benzema should Ancelotti choose not to risk the Frenchman. Here Ancelotti admitted that Bale might have