Paris Saint-Germain defender Presnel Kimpembe has admitted that the team took Manchester United lightly ahead of Wednesday’s shock 3-1 home defeat in the second leg of their Champions League round of 16 tie.
It was a result that saw the Ligue 1 leaders crash out of the competition after becoming the first side to fail to qualify after winning the first leg away from home by two or more goals.
Kimpembe was one of the central figures in the tie, escaping a red card and then scoring the opening goal soon after in the first leg, then giving away the crucial – and controversial – injury-time penalty in the second leg that allowed United to complete their comeback.
The 23-year-old said he understood the fans’ pain as PSG exited the Champions League at the last-16 stage for the third straight season.
Last year, the Parisians were leading Real Madrid 1-0 in Madrid in the first leg before conceding on the stroke of half-time and then twice more late in the game, leaving themselves too big a deficit to overcome in the second leg, while the year before that was the season of the infamous ‘Remontada’ when they beat Barcelona 4-0 in the first leg only to lose 6-1 in Spain in the second.
“It hurts me, very bad even, I feel what the fans feel,” he said on Youtube’s Brog Stories channel.
“I can see their anger, I realise it, I understand it and, most importantly, I assume it so that I can swallow it. It’s a game that inevitably stays in the heads but that we will have to forget for the rest of the season.”
Kimpembe vowed that he and the rest of the team would never allow themselves to be tripped up by complacency again after saying a sense of “self-satisfaction” had permeated the side after the first leg against United.
“We lost that grit and that rage we had in the first leg,” he said. “It’s not the fact of having lived through past experiences that made us feel stressed. or whatever it was. No, it was really a self-satisfaction.
“We took this game lightly, and it’s something that will never happen to me again. It’s enough, never again.”
