Ferran Torres was supposed to be the useful extra body. Three goals into Paris Saint-Germain’s Champions League defence, the summer signing from Barcelona looks a good deal more like a problem — and the problem belongs to the forwards ahead of him.
Torres scored a hat-trick as Paris beat Slovan Bratislava 6-1 at the Parc des Princes on Wednesday night, the club’s first genuinely convincing performance of a season that had begun badly. Our full report on the 6-1 win covers the scale of it: 21 shots in the first half alone, according to Get French Football News, and a Slovak goalkeeper who could reasonably have asked for the night off.
Ferran Torres and the Dembele connection
What should worry the rest of Luis Enrique’s attack is not the hat-trick itself but who supplied it. Ousmane Dembele, who scored twice himself, set up two of Torres’ three goals, per PSG Talk. The Frenchman operated through the middle with Torres starting from the left, and the pair swapped positions so often that Slovan simply stopped tracking either of them.
That is the kind of understanding that usually takes a season. Torres arrived from Barcelona in the summer for a reported 48.5 million euros and took the number nine shirt; he has been a Paris player for a matter of weeks. Reaching this level of coordination with Dembele already is the sort of thing that starts changing team sheets.
Torres was suitably unbothered afterwards. “I wasn’t expecting to score a hat-trick,” he told Canal Plus. “We had to bring intensity, press when it was needed. We played a good match. I’m feeling good, it’s easy to play with this kind of player. I try to enjoy it, to be happy.”
The front three cannot coast
Paris won back-to-back European Cups with a forward line that barely needed thinking about. That has quietly stopped being true. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia was an unused substitute against Slovan. Desire Doue is competing for the same minutes. And now there is a former Barcelona forward in the squad who has scored in his first Ligue 1 appearance and his first Champions League appearance in a Paris shirt, the former noted by Get French Football News.
This is, of course, exactly what Luis Enrique wants. His entire method at the Parc has been to build a squad in which nobody’s place is a given and reputation buys nothing. A front three that knows a man in Torres’ form is waiting behind them is a front three that trains differently.
There is a caveat worth keeping in view. Slovan Bratislava, managed by Yaya Toure, were not a serious test of anything, and one hat-trick against them does not reorder a European champion’s attack. Maghnes Akliouche, who danced through the Slovak defence to tee up Torres’ second, is still without a goal for the club. Nights like this flatter everyone involved.
Why it matters now
Context is what gives the Torres story its weight. Paris are winless in Ligue 1 after three matches — draws away at Rennes and Lille, then a 2-1 defeat to Monaco — and sit seven points behind Monaco at the top. A team that has spent two seasons being ruthless has looked, domestically, like it has forgotten how.
Six goals in Europe does not fix that. But a forward who is scoring on arrival, linking instinctively with the best player at the club and forcing established names to look over their shoulder is a more useful thing to have found in September than almost anything else. For more on the man himself, see our profile: who is Ferran Torres?
Les Parisiens have a European title to defend and a league position to repair. On the evidence of Wednesday, they have one more attacker capable of helping with both than they thought they did.
