Désiré Doué joins the global A-list to lead PSG's coronation as kings of Europe

Irish Examiner

2 days ago

The third great Moment of Doué was beautiful for its simplicity, 63 minutes into this game and with Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) 2-0 up. As Désiré Doué glided in on goal, all alone suddenly in a wide open patch of green, he was found by a deliciously weighted through pass from Vitinha.
From there Doué allowed the ball to run across him as the retreating Inter defenders closed at his back, a perfect little screenshot of time, space, angles, ground speed allowing him to open his right instep and shoot with the path of the pass, wrong-footing Yann Sommer and easing the ball into the far corner.
The celebration, and indeed the game itself to that point, felt coronational. Doué took off his shirt, saw it placed on the corner flag and stood in clean-cut gladiatorial pose in front of the Paris supporters, before slightly sheepishly – this is also very Doué-like – going to retrieve his shirt and accept his yellow card.
By then the game was gone, as was Doué shortly after, replaced by Bradley Barcola. And really it was his opening 20 minutes that decided this Champions League final.
Doué is a very distinct kind of attacking tyro, with a martial artist's precision in his close-quarter fast-twitch movements, always just enough of a feint and a snap of the heels, always purposeful, never gratuitous. Watching him on nights such as this, it is as though somebody has taken Neymar and boiled him for eight hours until all the waffle and frippery have disappeared, then sent him on to the pitch crisp and starched and purified. This is a Neymar without the madness, the weight, the excess appetite, a post-therapy Neymar.
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Plus, of course, Doué has that thing all the best players have, the compound eye vision, the ability to freeze, rewind, judge the space and angles around him in the tiniest flicker of everyone else's analogue time. How do you get like this, aged 19, on this stage, a goal and an assist in the opening 20 minutes of the Champions League final, for a team that have never won it, and who you joined only last summer?
Doué has been a late-breaking story this season after his move from Rennes. He didn't score his first goal at the Parc des Princes until March. He hadn't scored or assisted in eight games coming into this final. But he is without question the high-ceilinged real deal. Lamine Yamal may be more obviously, cinematically effective. But Doué is at the same level, just more compact and less lavish, the further maths version to Yamal's bold strokes of fine art.
By the end here, as another 19-year-old, Senny Mayulu, made it 5-0 against a frazzled Inter, this had become the perfect night for PSG and for the Paris Project, overseen by the unclosing hand of Qatar Sports Investments.
First we take the world. Then we take Europe, via Paris, Doha and now Munich. For the state of Qatar and its interests this is football pretty much completed. In the space of three years the world's most relentlessly efficient gas state's outreach arm has won a home World Cup, led by its star player, the emir's tailor's dummy Lionel Messi, and now the greatest club prize.
Paris Saint-Germain's French midfielder Desire Doue (C) celebrates with PSG's Portuguese midfielder Joao Neves (2R) and Brazilian defender Marquinhos (R). Pic: INA FASSBENDER/AFP via Getty Images
PSG are currently the best team in the world, treble winners and champions of Europe, the scalps of three recent finalists dangling from their belts on that run. And really this was just too easy most of the time, a flaneuring kind of victory against opponents who were always either chasing, panting for breath or windmilling away just out of reach.
Munich had spent Saturday baking in the sun, a city already on its summer holidays, green fringes thronged with picnickers, sunbathers and knots of Italian men sweating across the white heat of the Englische Garten in blue and black nylon shirts.
The Allianz Arena is an epic, widescreen kind of stage, those steeply tiered stands curving towards a perfectly puckered oval of powder blue above the lip of the roof. Ten minutes before kick-off it was still hot and heavy, the kind of evening that makes you sweat just sitting still.
Linkin Park, who must have a very good agent, put on an agreeably energetic pre-match rap-metal stomp-about. A celebrity violinist performed a hideous screeching Seven Nation Army fiddle-along. The giant Parisian tifo was scrolled away. And from the start this was just pain for Inter, a time to run and harry and chase younger and fresher opponents as the Mendes-Vitinha midfield pivot, PSG's velcro-touch directors of traffic, just took the ball away.
Physical and mental intensity were always going to be key. PSG have been able to replenish the stocks, let the bruises heal, rest their best players. Inter have been all-in, flailing through a series of crunch end-of-season dates, limbs sloshing with lactic acid all the way to the line.
It showed. For 12 minutes this was a kind of smothering. After that it became an extended execution, led by Doué. The first goal came from a lovely piece of applied geometry, all clean crisp lines, made first by Khvicha Kvaratskhelia easing inside two defenders. From there the blue shirts completed a high-speed passing triangle, the key ball from Vitinha pinged hard into the feet of Doué, who had found space by not moving, holding his position while Inter's defenders went to cover. He clipped the ball back for Achraf Hakimi to side-foot into an empty net.
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The second goal eight minutes later was a break the full length of the pitch, PSG funnelling out from their own corner flag, finding Ousmane Dembélé in space, there to gallop away, all easy grace, head up, before curling a crossfield pass into the run of Doué. He controlled with his torso, then hit down on the ball at the top of its bounce, a deflection taking it past Sommer.
Either side PSG were immaculate. This was box-fresh elite club football, possession, counterpress, swift transitions. At times it's like watching a team of head prefects, a supremely drilled exhibition the Iberian-Catalan Style, with just the right bolt-on parts in every role.
This is of course the work of Luis Enrique, who has won 11 out of 11 finals, and who was up from the start at the edge of his rectangle, all in black with white trainers, lithe and animated, revolving both arms, shuttle running left to right, like a mime artist taking part in a gruelling military fitness drill.
It has been said Luis Enrique turned to Paris two years ago after being appalled by the despotic owners of Chelsea and Spurs, which is certainly an interesting take on the extraordinary freedoms inherent in the Qatari propaganda project. But he has been the perfect man at the perfect time, the ideologue, the data-based strongman, here just as the years of celebrity overdose are finally cashed in, brand leveraged, income vast enough to leave PSG with a free hand to build a brilliant, hungry, youthful modern team.
The idea has been to create a group of anti-stars. Good luck with that. Doué will now take his place, up there floating in his tin can high above the world, the latest addition to the global A-list. From Paris via Doha, with Catalan style, Asturian brains, past the scars of all those glitzy late stage slumps, PSG now stand at the summit.
Guardian