Zlatan is PSG’s best player, blessed with gifts that are beyond mere mortals. But he does also seem to slow the thrust of his team at times

There is a game you can play with football that involves listing the kind of phrases you’ll never, ever hear anyone say in public. For example in the peak years of his Manchester United dotage the phrase “Paul Scholes, he’s a bit overrated isn’t he?” was effectively unprintable, its publication likely to spark mob anger, civil unrest, punishable ultimately by being stabbed in the eye with a skewer by the Queen.

It can be an interesting exercise to think the otherwise unsayable. Watching Chelsea’s stirring rearguard at the Parc des Princes against a dominant Paris Saint-Germain team who will contemplate their narrow first-leg lead with a little anxiety, another candidate for the list occurred.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic scored a goal, had a hand in Edinson Cavani’s second and made a decisive difference against a suffocating deep defence. As knockout matches go this was up there with his best against English opposition, a counterpart to that memorable cutting-edge performance for Barcelona against Arsenal at the Emirates six years ago.

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Still, though, at times it was hard to avoid the impression as PSG’s attacks crashed against the Chelsea breakwaters that Ibrahimovic’s best qualities – virtuoso touches, the irresistible imperative that the team play through him – are less likely to unsettle the stronger teams in Europe than they are the routinely terrorised defences of Ligue 1. That perhaps, oddly enough, the focus on his magnetic talents is even a hindrance for a group of players with no shortage of talent in other areas.

This is not to weasel away at the obvious brilliance of a player capable of moments of skill and physical dexterity beyond the reach of pretty much anyone else on the planet. Ibrahimovic remains elite European football’s own dazzling kung-fu colossus, a player whose famously moreish highlights reel is backed by the hard yards of goals scored, 12 league titles won at six different clubs and an underrated appetite for the physical battle. He is, in so many ways, a joy to watch.

At the same time this is an unusual elite footballer with unusual elite gifts, one whose outline can often be obscured by that irresistible charisma. Not least in France where his wider importance both to the league and its champion team is hard to overstate. The daily newspaper Aujourd’hui en France was familiarly fawning in its praise on Wednesday morning, announcing that Ibrahimovic’s contribution at the Parc “proved to anyone who wants to listen that he can still be decisive in these knockout games”.

Which is an interesting choice of words. Another way of looking at it would be to point out that this is the first time it’s actually happened. Before Tuesday night Ibrahimovic’s record for PSG against elite opponents, the combined might of Real Madrid, Barcelona, Chelsea, Porto and Valencia read: played 10, won one, scored three.

Tuesday night was the first time in three-and-a-half seasons in France he had played and scored in a victory against serious opposition in either group or knockout stages of the Champions League. To date his overall record in this competition reads played 79, scored 38 in the group stages, against played 37 scored eight in the knockout rounds. Zlatan’s many ardent supporters, those who are fans as opposed to curious neutral observers, might not like it. But clearly something’s going on here.

When to stick and when to twist. It is a problem for any club on the rise. It has been an unfortunate habit in English football to mock PSG’s pretensions. To see a manufactured entity loved only by its own exiled ultras, a marketing tool of Qatar, 21st desert-arrondissement of Paris, hurling its sovereign natural gas wealth at a soulless big city branding exercise.

And yet the signing of Zlatan has been a huge success however you look at it, a player of brilliant gifts given free rein to bloom and spread by a hospitable league and a hospitable club. Elsewhere he might simply be another ageing A-lister, another part of the constellation. At Paris-Qatar he stands unchallenged, his own planet: jupiter the gas giant.

Domestic supremacy, global status, instant A-list branding: all of these have been successfully Zlatanned by PSG in the past four years. And yet, there are perhaps some legitimate questions over the trajectory from here of this well-seasoned superstar team. The stated goal is not just to qualify every year but actually to win the Champions League. How easy that will be for a team geared so powerfully both in style and tempo to the overarching Zlatan supremacy is another matter.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zlatan Ibrahimovic celebrates after scoring against Chelsea. Photograph: Franck Fife/AFP/Getty Images

There is a tactical paradox in this. Zlatan is PSG’s best player, blessed with gifts that are beyond mere mortals. But he does also seem to slow the thrust of his team at times. Perhaps this matters less in the French league where Ibrahimovic can have plenty of touches safe in the knowledge his team’s dominance will eventually open space for a moment of incision.

Against Chelsea there were some lovely moments of linking and team-play. But PSG could have scored more. Their two goals came from direct, hard-running breaks by Lucas and Ángel di María. Ibrahimovic was involved less than usual overall, touching the ball 59 times. He really should have made it 3-1 at the death. At least twice he could be seen waving his arms and complaining about the routine close attentions of Gary Cahill. He didn’t run in behind. He didn’t really seem to run very much at all.

This it to be expected of course. Zlatan is 34, and in a team where other players are detailed to do the hard running. Of nine strikers who have played more than 520 minutes in the Champions League this season he has run the least, and in the main by a considerable distance. Still, he has the one-off talent to demolish Chelsea in the second leg given time and space. Perhaps this is even destined to be the moment he does exactly that, away from home in a finely poised second leg against the champions of England.

Reinvention, moving on, taking the next step: these are problems Chelsea have also faced with the fading away of their own founding core of the Abramovic years. For the current team it felt significant PSG weren’t able to convert possession into a heavy defeat or dominate the midfield physically as they had in the 2-2 draw last year. For PSG it is perhaps equally significant that that triumph at Stamford Bridge, arguably the best knockout win of the Zlatan years, was still possible with their main man off the pitch. What Ligue 1’s reigning sun king does next will remain the main fascination in France until his contract impasse is resolved. How his current employers go about building a team after that not just to charm and thrill but to beat the best in Europe could be just as interesting.