Martial’s departure sealed Manchester United’s fate

PSG took a commanding 2-0 lead against Manchester United in the first leg of their round of 16 tie, after Anthony Martial was forced off.

It seemed fitting, given that the run-up to this match had been dominated by talk of who wouldn’t be playing, that the game should be decided by an enforced absence on the night: Anthony Martial’s halftime substitution turned this tie decisively in PSG’s favor.

PSG coach Thomas Tuchel had clearly been mindful of the threat posed by Martial — who could blame him after the Frenchman’s goal against Fulham on Saturday? — and consequently deployed three defensively strong players on his team’s right-hand side.

In response, Manchester United decided to focus their attacks on PSG’s opposite flank, presumably because they believed Marco Verratti, Presnel Kimpembe and Juan Bernat would be easier to bypass.

The result was that so little of the play went down PSG’s right that Martial managed just 17 touches during his 45 minutes on the pitch. Half an hour into the game, viewers could be forgiven for not knowing the right-sided of PSG’s three center-backs was Thilo Kehrer, so seldom had he been on-screen, or that the guy with the shaved head on that side of the ground was 35-year-old Dani Alves.

But following Martial’s injury-enforced departure at the break, all that changed and the game turned PSG’s way. In the opening minutes of the second-half, Alves was suddenly 30 or 40 yards further up the pitch and at the center of the action.

A series of crosses by the Brazilian led to a David de Gea save, and from the resulting corner came PSG’s opening goal. At that point, the French side comfortably sat back and seven minutes later added a sublime second, which pretty much ended the contest.

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There were other absences that defined the game, too. One was the lack of any kind of plan B from Ole Gunnar Solskjaer after the game turned against his team. When the camera cut to the United manager following PSG’s second goal, the Norwegian looked lost. Another lingering shot of Solskjaer later in the half suggested his mood had now passed into melancholy.

Yes, the options available to him had been curtailed by the loss of both Martial and Jesse Lingard to injury before the second period. But there was still a conspicuous failure by United’s manager to rearrange his side, to try something new, and such passive responses have certainly counted against his immediate predecessors.

In addition, Solskjaer has himself benefited greatly from his opponents’ injury woes during some high-profile wins in recent weeks, so it’s hard to feel a great deal of sympathy for him. The enforced departure of Moussa Sissoko proved decisive in January’s game against Spurs, with United’s winning goal coming just moments later. A couple of weeks afterwards, Arsenal lost both starting center-backs to injury as United knocked them out of the cup.

Finally, the absence of a yellow card for Marco Verratti, which would have ruled him out of the second leg, would seem to settle the tie. With the sublime Italian in midfield, PSG should have more than enough to see this through.

Although it was clear in the first half that Verratti is a little rusty following injury, he was still at the center of almost all PSG’s fine transitions from defense to attack, just as he had been in their excellent home performance against Liverpool during the group stages.

The ongoing exile from the PSG squad of the Adrien Rabiot, due to his refusal to sign a new contract, might yet prove later in the competition to be a wanton act of self-harm by the club. But for now at least, the French champions look set to progress comfortably.