PSG – Nice: Galtier wonders why his team had “difficulty setting the pace” – 20 Minutes

Joys of an overloaded calendar, upcoming Champions League match or substitutes still in the run-in? To what do we owe the mediocre performance, although victorious, of Paris Saint-Germain against OGC Nice on Saturday evening? No doubt a bit of all three. “The international break and Wednesday’s match in the Champions League (against Benfica) can generate demobilization among players, analyzed hot Christophe Galtier. It’s more difficult to come back to competition when you’ve traveled a lot and you’ve just come back from selection. We had very little time to work. Did the players want to do the minimum service? I do not believe that. “It’s almost the most curious thing about PSG’s last games. A lot of false rhythm, difficulty in putting intensity in the races and the transmission of balls, but also a desire to do well (except possibly Hakimi when it comes to defending). Take Ekitike and its lousy stats. As a reminder, he played at the forefront of the attack, did not strike once and very rarely turned towards goal. Not great, a priori. Galtier “saw players who had difficulty entering the match” On the other hand, the former Rémois also sought to participate in the construction by soliciting Messi and Neymar, as well as t happened to him to tear himself away to recover high balls. Proof that it was not I don’t care. “I saw players who had difficulty entering the match and restarting the second period”, regrets the Parisian coach. If Marquinhos refutes the idea of ​​​​physical fatigue, at least concerning him – for once, he didn’t have to leave France to play with Brazil – because “it’s the start of the season, and we have no excuse”, Galtier sees signs of fatigue. “The first period could make me think that we could accelerate, but the start of the second period was very bad with few races and very little technical mastery. Nice equalized and it was deserved. We had to inject fresh blood to regain speed. “Poor management of the rotation of the workforce? Fresh blood which was none other than that of usual holders left to rest like Mbappé and Mendes, who returned shortly after the hour mark in place of Bernat and Ekitike. Apart from Nordi Mukiele, immense except for his role in the goal conceded by PSG, the substitutes did not really meet expectations, while they are supposed to be the guarantors of the continuity of results in L1. Still they should have more time to play. Sending Ekitike into the lion’s den without having really made him play before is what is called a poisoned gift. And if in fact, all this was only the expression of an imbalance between the playing time of one and the other, making the first indispensable and the second unfit to compensate for their absence due to a lack of rhythm and benchmarks? And if the main culprit was Christophe Galtier, who took his replacements out of the closet out of opportunism without having sufficiently prepared them in advance.