No excuses as rich Paris St-Germain continue poor start to season | Jonathan Wilson

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PSG's status makes them the side every other team in France wants to see fail. When you've been responsible for 70% of your league's transfer spending, the usual explanations ring hollow
With billionaire owners and big-spending clubs, ridicule is never far away. Even those who don't hate them for their wealth and the way they've skewed the competition can hardly help but smirk when things go against them and the little man fights back. Paris St-Germain have never been a popular club but they are in danger of becoming a ridiculous club, at least in the short term. Having needed a last-minute Zlatan Ibrahimovic equaliser to take a point from Lorient on the opening weekend of the season, they were held to a goalless draw by Ajaccio on Sunday.
Yes, it was hot. Yes, the pitch was poor. Yes, Zlatan was injured. Yes, Ajaccio were well-organised, grimly committed to earning their point. But this is PSG: when you've been responsible for 70% of your league's transfer spending over the summer, the usual excuses no longer apply. They have to win and they have to win in style, otherwise there is no point to the experiment. At the moment, it's as though a selection of the world's greatest chefs have been gathered in one restaurant and have delivered nothing more than a couple of slices of slightly burned toast.
The shape on Sunday, as it had been against Lorient, as it is always likely to be when Carlo Ancelotti has his way, was a 4-3-2-1. With Zlatan absent, Ezequiel Lavezzi moved into the central striking role, with Jérémy Ménez and Nene behind him. The back four of Christophe Jallet, Alex, Mamadou Sakho and Maxwell remained unchanged and Clément Chantôme kept his place in the right of the midfield three, with Blaise Matuidi and Javier Pastore replacing Marco Verratti and Mathieu Bodmer. Lavezzi, presumably, was supposed to play as a false nine, dropping off to allow the full-backs and the midfield to break beyond him.
Certainly there are plenty of players in that side capable of doing so. Ancelotti, criticising the "complacency" of his team and how that later turned into "aggression", insisted the side was "balanced", and he was probably right. Lavezzi, though, never looked comfortable in the role and the suspicion is that he is at his most effective when he has space in front of him to run into – and that, of course, is precisely what Ajaccio denied him. He became increasingly frustrated, resulting in a red card for a two-footed lunge on Benjamin André that managed somehow to be both ugly and half-hearted.
That, in fact, summed up PSG. Their passing was sloppy, their movement uninspired and, most alarmingly, they seemed lacking in commitment and conviction. It's easy to put tactical problems down to attitude – the cry for more passion has been a blight on the English game for decades – and perhaps the temperature did mean that the game had to be approached at a reduced pace, but there was a sense of a team expecting something to happen rather than making sure that it did so.
Pastore can be a wonderfully destructive player but, like all playmakers, he needs people moving off him. They didn't and so he was reduced to ambling ineffectiveness, a cameo nutmeg the sum of his contribution. Sakho, meanwhile, looked edgy for the second week running and it was his squandering of possession that led to Eduardo hitting the post early in the second half. When Thiago Silva is available, he presumably will be the man to step down.
Ajaccio, of course, must take credit. Sigamary Diarra and André did a fine job of pinning in their respective full-backs, denying PSG meaningful width while Ricardo Faty and Jean-Baptiste Pierazzi did a fine job of sitting in front of a deep-lying back four. Would it have been different had Zlatan been fit? Perhaps, if only because his aerial prowess would have meant that Ajaccio couldn't have sat so deep. Even the introduction of an orthodox centre-forward in Kevin Gameiro, who came on for Ménez after 65 minutes, caused Ajaccio more unease than they had faced previously. The more teams try to play with a false nine, the more Barcelona's remarkable use of one seems.
The pattern is one that seems increasingly common in the modern game, and certainly it is one PSG will have to get used to: the better side, whose game is possession-based, finds itself facing an opposition that largely allows it the ball but packs players in the final third to prevent them doing anything about it (actually, so poor were PSG, so ineffective at retrieving possession or holding it, that they ended up having just 48% of the ball against Ajaccio).
Arsenal had exactly the same issue against Sunderland on Saturday and, while they were rather better than PSG and had enough chances to have won the game, they too were frustrated. They too suffered from a centre-forward, in Lukas Podolski, who is at his best with the ball in front of him. Although Olivier Giroud drew most of the attention with his late miss, the bigger concern was Podolski's ineffectiveness. He's not good enough in the air to make a defence wary of sitting too deep, and he's neither physically not technically gifted enough to hold the ball up effectively. It may be that, a little like Theo Walcott, he is at his best against better teams who won't just sit deep and look to stifle Arsenal (or once Arsenal already have a lead and the opposition is forced to attack).
At least Arsenal have a number of top-class sides to face. For PSG, this season is likely to be a slog against massed defences. The French league is instinctively cautious anyway, and the better PSG do, the more their financially enhanced shadow looms, the more teams will retreat into their shell against them – Bordeaux's approach against them on Sunday will be telling in that regard. That creates another issue for them, one faced by all clubs overwhelmingly larger than their domestic competitors, and that is that the football they are used to playing is very different from that they will have to play in the Champions League. One is essentially attack against defence, the other a more balanced, nuanced game; as Igor Biscan noted of Dinamo Zagreb's situation a few years ago, it's very easy for a team to forget how to fight.
PSG's status makes them the side every other team in France wants to see fail and it also makes opponents play defensively against them. Even if they do find a way to overcome that, it isn't necessarily equipping them for the European success their owners clearly desire.


Jonathan Wilson

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