With Neymar the questions have always been along the same kind of lines. How far? How good? To what height can the broad wings of his own attacking talent carry him? At a slightly wild Parc des Princes, Liverpool lost an exciting, slightly fractious Champions League game 2-1, menaced throughout by a star striker intent on posing two very different sets of questions.

For the opening 40 minutes, Liverpool felt the force of what was surely Neymar’s most effective high-profile performance since his Barcelona days. This was followed by the beta version: a second half of circus play and indulgence on the ball, with Neymar tumbling to the turf like a tiny little Victorian fairy sprite lashed with a blow from the under-gardener’s rake; and beyond that the full range of attacking ego-ball.

Other questions kept coming in that period. For example: has there ever been a more annoying extremely good player than Neymar? Has there been a more extremely annoying good player than Neymar? These are, of course, the wrong questions. But they do seem unavoidable at times.

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With the final whistle close and Liverpool pressing with some exasperation, Neymar took the ball from a corner and did his own superstar version of shielding it by the flag. Except in the Neymar model, you face your opponent, rippling those golden shoulders, tempting the pack to be the first to lunge in and find themselves diddled by a feather-footed switch of feet. Except, perhaps, not on this occasion, Neymar old bean. As he rolled the ball from foot to foot, Andrew Robertson walked in and kicked him up in the air with a full swing of the left foot into the shin, the kind of well-timed foul you hear in the crowd like a sack full of custard being slapped hard against a door frame. Neymar fell and rolled about in a state of grief. Robertson was booked, nodding in acceptance of an earned punishment. A few moments later in the same corner, Neymar performed an insultingly louche and carefree rainbow flick over the head of Xherdan Shaqiri, adding a note of cheek and grating malandro charm to a performance that had begun with a sleekly engineered sense of purpose.

Back in May, Thomas Tuchel had sought out an audience with Neymar ahead of taking the PSG job. Neymar listened graciously. And so it came to pass that he approved Tuchel’s plans, unsurprisingly given the manager’s seductive talk of building a team around his “artist”. Albeit with some noises about “making a structure”, the sense that Neymar, the great forward-rolling individualist of the age would still find himself wedded to the collective.

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Fast forward six months to a damp, boisterous night at the Parc and in that opening period Tuchel achieved something Tite didn’t manage at the World Cup. He persuaded Neymar to give us less not more of Neymar, to play for the team, to stick to his wing and allow the rest of this game to breathe around him.

PSG began in a surprisingly rigid-looking 4-4-2, with Neymar hugging his touchline. It worked too. Neymar stayed on the periphery, allowing the other parts of this team to bubble away and create their own chemistry. He passed quickly, didn’t over dribble, and let his snap with the ball do its work.

For a while Ángel Di Maria teased Liverpool on the left flank, pirouetting around his strong left foot like a supermarket trolley with a broken wheel. To his credit, Neymar was 30 yards back filling in behind when Juan Bernat made the run that led to the first goal after 12 minutes; Bernat shooting low into the corner. Neymar gestured wildly at the near stand. And for a while, Liverpool were in danger of being overrun, treated to a dose of their own tactical medicine as PSG outnumbered them on the flanks in swarming little three-man attacks.

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From Neymar there was a lovely little effortless nutmeg of Jordan Henderson, whose upright style always seems vulnerable to this kind of thing, leaving him whirling around on the spot like a red-shirted Dalek. And it was from that same left flank that the second goal came before half-time. Neymar fed Mbappé who crossed for Cavani and from the loose ball, Neymar had time to stop, muse on his own precious destiny, then side-foot the ball into the net.

From there Liverpool pressed hard, pulling one back through James Milner’s penalty. The game was increasingly interrupted by free kicks as bad Neymar stalked the pitch. PSG stopped playing, lost the thrust down the wings. They hung on to the end. But for this team the message here was clear enough. More of the good parts, more of the right questions, more of that discipline and they might just have a star player ready to be remembered for the right stuff.