If you look at the run of 3 big games in the 2 weeks leading up to the first leg, despite how big the games were to our season, we did still rotate a fair amount through them.
The reality is I’d doubt PSG had 3 such challenging games in the league all season, and we had 3 in a week leading up to playing them. It’s a draining schedule running up to the biggest game of the season no matter how you approach it.
Once again Paris policing shown to be shitty
In France there’s no in-between it’s either peaceful or a riot as soon as the police are involved. 
My point exactly. And as Slot himself noted, he was going to see if there was any advantage to finishing in the top bracket. There was none!
We put in too much into the group stage. Throw in the PL and Cup games and we ended up playing PSG at the absolute wrong time
Its not the rotation per se but how we paced ourselves. By the time PSG came around our performance graph was at best plateauing…
There’s a definite advantage to finishing in the top eight - you don’t have to play the extra playoff round. But where you finish in the top eight is totally irrelevant.
I’m not even disagreeing with you there.
The idea of a club throwing matches to finish in a more favourable position doesn’t sit right with me.
This was something beyond our control
Right, but what does that have to do with games we played, and mostly cantered through, in Sept, October, and Novemeber in the CL compared to the brutal 2 weeks we had in domestic competition leading up to the first leg?
Well those two weeks were quite decisive in the overall scheme of things
I think the competition proved clearly that there’s no significant advantage
I’m not sure how you could conclude that from my points above
EDITED
Of course, but what are you going to do. That was the way the season was served up to us and we had to work our way through that portion of the season, and did so while making a decent number of changes through those games.
The bigger point though is that compared to the effort we put in to navigate the CL group stage, which was a relative canter, most of which was months earlier, the CL campaign itself is just something I cannot see as having contributed to the state we were in by the time we played the,
It all adds up. You time your build up to ensure continuous growth and to peak at the right time
So it’s Slot’s fault.
#Slot-out!
Just saw the highlights. Gotta say, that was a romp by PSG. Haven’t seen a team move the ball like that in a long time. Breathtaking, and without a lot of big-money players. Good system, athleticism on display. Vitinha’s run from the back for their third was outstanding
@Semmy, I wouldn’t say that. They have excellent young players, yes, but they didn’t get them for cheap. From the wiki page:
PSG bet on promising prospects such as Warren Zaïre-Emery, Vitinha, Bradley Barcola, Lucas Beraldo, Manuel Ugarte, João Neves, Willian Pacho, Lee Kang-in and Désiré Doué.[117][118][120] Some of these youngsters came at a cost, though, with three of them breaking into PSG’s top five most expensive signings: Randal Kolo Muani from Eintracht Frankfurt for €75m,[121] Khvicha Kvaratskhelia from Napoli for €70m,[122] and Gonçalo Ramos from Benfica for €65m.[123]
They might have moved from their ‘stars at any cost’ policy, but they fundamentally remain one of the big oil-cheating clubs, owned by a country ruled by a despotic regime, and are in a league of their own in Ligue 1. All other clubs are very rarely given a chance to compete with them for the title. Once in five or six years maybe?
Bottom-line: they’ll never get any compliments from me as long as these facts remain.
Other than Donarouma who arrived on a free, Fabian Ruiz is their “cheapest” player at about 40 million. But given how in demand he was when he left Italy and he went straight to PSG without even talking to anyone else you have to assume he is on a big wedge, which mitigates the relatively cheap signing fee.
It is an incredibly expensively constructed squad
