Sensational, aggressive and exciting. When two teams full of the world's best players play with their hearts, football is truly great. Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) beat Bayern Munich 5-4 in the first leg of their Champions League semi-final on Tuesday. It was truly that. So it is now being said that this will probably be remembered for a long time as one of the greatest games in the history of Champions League football. 

PSG's Ousmane Dembele, who won the Ballon d'Or last year, said after the match, "When two teams are not afraid to attack, the game is like this. This was not a match of inferiority, it was a Champions League semi-final. We all know how good Bayern are and where were we inferior?" Harry Kane and Michael Olis scored for the German champions in the first half. 

Kvitova Kvartsekheliya and Joao Neves scored for PSG. When Dembele did, PSG were 3-2 up at the end of the first half. Then Quartsekheliya and Dembele also scored 1-1. It seemed that the home team had become stronger in the two-legged match. But no, Bayern did not stop there and Diogo Upamecano and Luis Diaz scored one goal each for the team. The match was a 9-goal ‘thriller’. 

PSG coach Luis Enrique said, ‘I am very tired, but I did not have to run as many kilometers as the players, this match was really everything. I think we deserved to win this match. Maybe we would have deserved the same if we had drawn, not only that, but even if we had lost, it would have been the right result.’ The French sports daily made the match the main news on the front page of its Wednesday issue. Its title is, ‘Total Football’. This was a sign of the style of football played by Dutch great Johan Cruyff in the seventies. Not only Enrique, but also Bayern coach Vincent Kompany deserves equal credit for such a game. Perhaps to some extent, Bayern's defense was weak. 

But Kompany did not try to stop his team's attack. If Kompany had not devised this strategy, the game would probably have ended 5-2 in PSG's favor. But Bayern's comeback can now be believed that the second leg match next Wednesday will be very sensational, aggressive and exciting. The fun fact is that Bayern has also conceded 5 goals in a single game for the first time since December 2023. 

It is also the first time that Bayern has conceded 5 goals in the Champions League since 1995. At that time, Bayern was scored 5 goals by Ajax. Kompany was not in the Bayern box due to the 'touchline' ban, he was a spectator. He watched the game from there. He was a defender in his playing career, he is a top-class defensive player. But when he became a coach of players with the same nature, his team has decided on a very aggressive strategy. Kompany, who is also a former coach of Burnley, later said, ‘Football is a bit like religion, people can believe as they want to believe, no one strategy is better than another in football. When I was in second division football in England, I played with a lot of long passes. In particular, there were two teams that had the same football philosophy.’ 

When the second leg takes place next week, both teams will not give up their aggressive strategy. Well, that game will decide which team reaches the final. And Enrique believes that only if PSG can score three more goals in that game will they be sure of a trip to the final. One of the two players involved in this game could also win this year’s Ballon d’Or. 

One of them is Quartet. He is the best performer in this season's Champions League. The other is Bayern's Kane. He himself is in excellent form. That too at the age of 33. And Aulis, Dembele and Desiree Dole will play for France in the next World Cup. So it will also be a warning to France's opponents. The current match reminds us of the occasion when Inter Milan beat Barcelona in the semi-finals last season. 

Inter won that 7-6 on aggregate. This is the first time in the modern history of the Champions League that so many goals have been scored in a single 'tie'. This is the first time that so many goals have been scored in a single 'tie' in 2020, if we forget a match in the league stage when Bayern beat Barcelona 8-2. The positive effect of the rule that away goals do not count more is now starting to be seen. 

Times have changed now. Otherwise, two decades ago, there were two such coaches in European football, whose strategy was mostly defensive. They were José Mourinho and Rafael Benitez. In the 2005-06 season, both semi-finals of the Champions League were played with only 2 goals scored in 4 games. In the semi-finals a year earlier, Benitez's Liverpool defeated Mourinho's Chelsea 1-0 on aggregate in the semi-finals.