At the Parc des Princes,
After PSG’s beautiful and convincing debut in the Champions League on Tuesday, against Borussia Dortmund, it would almost be blasphemous not to highlight the matches of Achraf Hakimi and Vitinha, both individually well above the fray against the Germans. And yet, this is what we are eagerly preparing to do. For a taste of sidestepping? Without the slightest doubt. Because you will read enough praise about them from almost everywhere among our colleagues? Also. But above all because our crush is Uruguayan, he is 22 years old, has bull legs and a youthful face with the ugly scarred skin that goes with it. He is Manuel Ugarte. Manu, for short.
The kind of hard-working little guy we like among the butchers in the sports department of 20 minutes. His absence against Nice, last Friday, had seen itself like the nose in the middle of the face, and poor Warren Zaire-Emery had struggled in vain at a sentry post which is not his, nothing helped. You are missing a being and everything is depopulated. Because yes, as crazy as it may seem, at the height of his 22 years and his five short matches with PSG, the one we were ready to put in the month of July in the cart of the famous midfielders-supposed-to-replace- Thiago-Motta-but-hey-mediocrity-you-know is set to become the essential cog in Luis Enrique’s team in midfield.
A balloon cruncher? Yes, but not only
The one who takes pleasure in doing the dirty work, who runs around like a madman to, here, win a shoulder duel, there, scratch a hot ball in the opponent’s feet. In short, to do what the players of the PSG have never done the past seasons, namely giving one’s life for the family. And if he was a little less successful on Tuesday evening from the point of view of recovering the ball (8 all the same), his stats since his arrival in Paris are enough to give mistletoe to Parisian supporters in need from their Italian control tower.
Crossed in the mixed zone after the match, the boy himself agreed when he was asked to judge his performance. “Good but it wasn’t my best match, defensively I lacked a bit of grit,” he admitted. But with the ball I think I did pretty well. ” Yes, we can say that. And that’s perhaps especially why we wanted to put him in the spotlight today. If his first matches had shown us his almost canine abilities to throw himself at all the balls, on Tuesday, it was in the way he used them once recovered that the Uruguayan amazed the public at the Park.
Luis Enrique: “He played a very complete match tonight. It is necessary for us that Manu brings this energy to the team, this ability to press high, fast and hard and to break the lines as soon as he gets the ball. He’s not just good at recovery. He is a very complete player from a technical point of view, with a superb reading of the offensive game. A player who, combined with Vitinha and Warren, brings the balance the team needs. » No matter how hard we looked, at no time did the boy get rid of a single ball, even though he was being pressed by several opposing players.
Like in particular this chest control-pass sequence with the outside of the foot while he was put under pressure in his six meters. If we got fired up – and we are going to do it – he would almost remind us, in this insolent nerve and his maximum risk-taking, a little Italian who went to Qatar and whose name escapes us. Throughout the match, Ugarte focused on playing simply, often with one or two touches of the ball, most of the time forward (which says a lot about the man’s playing intelligence).
Paris has found its golden ticket
At the pre-match press conference, Luis Enrique had said that his player could still improve in all areas. His match on Tuesday confirmed that the coach’s instructions are about to be assimilated. What are they, exactly? We asked him the question after the match. “I have to know straight away who the free players are around me to quickly give them the ball when I get it, in order to give numerical superiority to our attackers and our midfielders,” he explained. Today I think I managed to do it well. To get out of the pressing, the coach also asks me to spread the play on the wings, to give some air. But I can do better and I still need to improve. »
If we didn’t doubt his qualities as a recuperator, to the point of giving him the nickname (slipped by our colleague from France Bleu Paris and host of the 100% PSG show La tribune) of “ Cimarron »as this Uruguayan wild dog, we still didn’t know which foot to dance with him in the use of the ball. On Wednesday morning, Parisian supporters should have a little more certainty from this point of view. The only downside (and again, it is not his doing), there seems to be so much a PSG with and a PSG without him that one wonders how “Lucho” will manage when it is necessary to do without him. “He is tough as hell, he is very strong physically and he always wants to play,” the Spanish coach tried to reassure in a conference after the match. And then, asking this question is already admitting that Paris has possibly found THE ideal environment that it has been looking for for so many years, which is no small victory, you will agree.