Ousmane Dembele had just produced two goals and two assists in a 6-1 win. He chose to talk about what has gone wrong.
Paris Saint-Germain opened the defence of their Champions League crown on Wednesday night by taking Slovan Bratislava apart at the Parc des Princes, a 6-1 win that was as close to a free evening as European football offers. Our match report has the full picture — Ferran Torres with a hat-trick, Dembele with two, Fabian Ruiz late, 21 shots in the first half alone. And yet the club’s vice-captain came off the pitch and immediately reached for the word “poorly”.
What Ousmane Dembele actually said
“We had to win the match today because we started the season poorly,” Dembele said after full time, as carried by PSG Talk. “We had to keep going like this, demand even more from ourselves. We’re back-to-back European Champions, everybody wants to beat us.”
On his own condition he was more encouraging, if still short of satisfied. “I’m happy with my performance, I feel better and better,” he said. “I hope to get more and more minutes to pick up the pace.”
That is a striking pair of quotes from a player who had just contributed four goal involvements. There is no spin in either of them, and no attempt to use the scoreline as an argument.
He is not wrong about the start
The record backs him up. Paris are winless in Ligue 1 after three matches: 2-2 away at Rennes, 2-2 away at Lille, and then a 2-1 defeat to Monaco. Monaco sit top and Les Parisiens are seven points behind them already. The season’s only other win came in the UEFA Super Cup, 2-1 against Aston Villa; the Trophee des Champions was lost 1-0 to Lens.
For a club that has just won consecutive European Cups, that is a genuinely poor September, and the squad has clearly been told as much internally. Luis Enrique’s own framing of the start has not been notably softer.
The Luis Enrique pattern
There is a counter-argument, and it is a reasonable one. Under Luis Enrique, Paris have made a habit of treating the opening weeks as an extension of pre-season and peaking in the spring, when the Champions League knockouts arrive. Two European titles in two years is a difficult result to argue with, and nobody at the Parc is being paid for a strong August.
What is interesting is that Dembele declined to make that argument himself. “Everybody wants to beat us” is a warning rather than a reassurance. A team that is beaten by Monaco and drawing at Lille while it waits to warm up can find that the league table has moved on without it.
The Torres factor
The other reason Wednesday mattered to Dembele is who he was playing with. He set up two of Torres’ three goals, the pair rotating between the middle and the left until Slovan gave up trying to track them. It took the summer signing from Barcelona a matter of weeks to build that understanding, and it is now putting real pressure on the established front three.
Slovan Bratislava, for all the goals, were not a test. Their manager Yaya Toure called PSG “a machine” afterwards, which was generous of him and true of the night rather than of the season. Six goals against a side of that level proves the attack still functions; it does not prove the start has been fixed.
Dembele, to his credit, appears to know the difference. Paris return to Ligue 1 needing the version of themselves that showed up on Wednesday, against opponents who will not oblige them the same way.
