PSG-Bayern Was Everything Soccer Can And Should Be

In soccer, great offense does not necessarily imply terrible defense. It's a hard truth to retain in the face of a scoreline like 5-4, but what Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich did in the first leg of their Champions League semifinal was one of the purest distillations of attacking soccer ecstasy that I, or you, or anyone, has ever seen, and no amount of hemming and hawing about defensive lapses will ruin the memory of watching the two best teams in Europe throw everything they had at each other. It was simply glorious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxzqIzEVQNE

It makes sense that a semifinal between teams that feature the two best attacks in the world, attacks so terrifying at full health that it's possible to argue that the one that just hit 100 combined goals this season—only the fifth time that has happened, and only the third trio to do it, ever—is the weaker one. That would be Bayern's trident of Harry Kane (how wild would it be to see him win the Champions League the same season Tottenham Hotspur gets relegated?), Michael Olise, and Luis Díaz, all of whom scored on Tuesday night in Paris. You could do much, much worse even at this stage of the Champions League than that trio, but it's also theoretically possible to do better, and I'm relatively sure, though not certain, that PSG's striker-less trinity of Désiré Doué, Ousmane Dembélé, and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia is the one combination that is better. (For their part, the PSG trio did not all score, as Doué only had two assists, but both Dembélé and Kvaratskhelia notched two a piece, so it just about balances out.)