This Friday evening, on the lawn of the Parc des Princes, PSG did not need to force its talent to obtain three new points in the championship. It must be said that the face displayed by the Rennes team, the opponent of the evening, helped a lot. Before the match, at the beIN Sports microphone, coach Julien Stéphan asked for a little time before definitively judging his team, which has lacked consistency since the start of the season. “We are not going to learn anything after 5 days. We are rebuilding. We changed a lot of things. We have to give ourselves that time, even if in football there isn’t a lot of time. » Time, not sure that Stéphan will have any after the match this Friday evening. However, on paper, this Rennes team had enough to cause serious problems for PSG who had shown difficulties during the last matches. At the start of this match, Julien Stéphan could count on good ball players like Ludovic Blas, Amine Gouiri, Arnaud Kalimuendo or even Baptiste Santamaria and Azor Matusiwa.
But that was not enough, on the contrary. For almost 90 minutes, Rennes missed out on their match, multiplying technical inaccuracies and leaving quite astonishing spaces in the heart of the game. Proof of the performance well below expectations, at half-time, Steve Mandanda’s teammates , whistled by the Parisian public, had… 18% ball possession. A rather worrying statistic which perfectly illustrated the difficulties with the ball of this team which only sent each ball recovered a few seconds earlier directly into the Parisian feet. And with such a workforce, and more than 75 million spent in the summer transfer window to strengthen itself, Rennes cannot offer a service of this kind, especially on a technical level.
Julien Stéphan asks for time
In the post-match press conference, Julien Stéphan did not hide his disappointment and his helplessness in the face of his team’s performance. “We were dominated by a team capable of punishing us for very long actions and losses of balls which were fatal to us. The regret I have is the balls recovered in the last 30 meters, which we did not improve. The decision was to press them. We took this first goal in a strong moment for us. We absolutely had to progress very quickly in recovery. I would have really liked to see the end of the match at 2-3, because I think that there, things could have turned around. If we deserve to have two penalties at the Parc des Princes (editor’s note: Warren Zaire-Emery’s hand not whistled in the 78th), we go to the end and we must whistle them.launched the French technician after the meeting. It is true that Rennes had a little burst of pride at the end of the match, taking advantage of the numerous Parisian changes and the relaxation after the third goal. But it’s far too little to satisfy the Rennes supporters who saw their team feverish for almost 75 minutes.
“Our wake-up call is late because it got to 0-3. But it’s already happened, that’s one thing. We are still in development. We will see in the return match if we are able to resist. These are tests that arrive early. We are rebuilding together, we have been playing with this animation for 3 matches (in 3-4-3). There were also magicians opposite, capable of eliminating several players at the same time and making huge differences”specified the French coach. Not sure that this speech is really audible to the followers of the Reds and Blacks. And Julien Stéphan is already under pressure while his return to the Rennes bench is not going as planned. Despite an attractive squad on paper and numerous investments each summer, Rennes, currently in 8th place, has a string of insipid performances. That of this Friday evening was far too disappointing not to start seriously worrying both offensively and defensively. Julien Stéphan will have to come up with much better, and very quickly, even if he keeps asking for time.
