Newly fortified Paris Saint-Germain is visiting the northeast of France to take on FC Metz, and with the score tied at 1-1 at halftime, it’s already turned into a bad miss highlight reel fit for yakety sax background music.
Who else but Edinson Cavani is at the forefront, having scored the only PSG goal of the evening but also owning two glaring mistakes in front of net.
First, in the 10th minute, Cavani had a Julian Draxler rebound ricoche directly to him in front of a wide open net, but instead all he could do was pound the ball straight into the goalkeeper floundering in front of him from the Draxler save. He was no more than three feet off the line, but somehow failed to find the back of the net.
Cavani wasn’t done yet. In the 22nd minute, he managed to add another to the collection when he was one-on-one with the goalkeeper again, but failed to get it around Elji Kawashima and instead blasted the ball off the post.
The Uruguayan would eventually net PSG’s first in the 31st minute, but that wasn’t the end of the ugly showing, which apparently was contagious and migrated to the other side. Metz striker Emmanuel Riviere, formerly of Newcastle United, submitted his own resume by chasing down a rebound off Alphonse Areola, but with the net wide open and Areola slow to recover, he rifled the off-balance chance over the post.
Then, the referee got in on the act. With Metz challenging the Ligue 1 juggernaut hard just out of halftime, promiscuous former Tottenham midfielder Benoit Assou-Ekotto slid into Kylian Mbappe studs down and dispossessed the teenager, but with an impressive four-roll follow-through, Mbappe did enough to convince the referee to send Assou-Ekotto off with a straight red card.
That left Metz a man down, for which they were hopelessly outmatched. PSG scored three goals in the next 25 minutes, and that was all she wrote for the home side. Mbappe picked up a debut goal, Neymar scored, and Cavani grabbed a second. The final score read 5-1 with Lucas finishing it off in the dying minutes.