False Nine

14

On the long plane journey from London to Antigua I watched a recording on my iPad of the Paris Saint-Germain game against Barcelona in the early stages of the Champions League, last September. It was the match which PSG had won 3–2, and counted as a pretty stunning result for the French although the actual game seems to have been more immediately famous as the one when David Beckham turned up with guests Jay-Z and his wife Beyoncé, neither of whom looked as though they were much impressed with what they saw. Looking like Charlie Brown in his dorky, flat-brim baseball hat, Jay-Z couldn’t have seemed less comfortable if Beyoncé’s sister Solange had been sitting right behind him just waiting to give him another kicking in an elevator.

No one had expected PSG to win without the talismanic Zlatan Ibrahimovic — he had an injured heel — who must have regretted a chance to prove to his former club, Barcelona, that they had been wrong to let him leave on loan to AC Milan, in 2010. Frankly, anyone who saw the Swede’s thirty-yard wonder goal for Sweden against England in November 2012 knew that this was always a mistake. The French were also without their captain, Thiago Silva (thigh problem) and the Argentine striker Ezequiel Lavezzi (torn hamstring). And if all that wasn’t bad enough, Barcelona had fired six past Granada the previous weekend with a hat-trick from Neymar and two from Lionel Messi — the little Argentine’s 400th and 401st career goals. On the same weekend, PSG had struggled to get a 1–1 draw against the no-hopers from Toulouse. Even PSG’s manager, Laurent Blanc, had seemed to recognise the impossibility of the task ahead of him when, in a pre-match press conference, the former French captain had spoken of Barcelona as his side’s ‘near masters’.

But on the night against Barcelona, PSG played out of their skins and it was plain to see that this was the match that had persuaded the Catalan side to make a mid-season move for Jérôme Dumas, because while PSG’s goals had been scored by David Luiz, Marco Verratti and Blaise Matuidi, the man of the match was, without question, Jérôme Dumas. In and out of possession he had been the spirit of PSG’s impressive display. Having played for much of the previous season as a holding player, the young Frenchman was moved forward into the No. 10 role for the game against Barcelona, although his workrate did not seem to suffer in the least. Brimming with two-footed invention, he was a great example to the Parisians and on several occasions he managed to turn like a scalded cat in the tightest spaces and get his team out of pressure, creating chances where none had seemed to exist before.

Dumas was equally irrepressible in defence, frequently dropping back deep to aid David Luiz and Gregory van der Wiel, who were hard to break down, although Messi and Neymar tried hard enough. Halfway through the second half, Dumas had briefly looked tired, as if he might have to be taken off, but Laurent Blanc’s decision to keep him on proved inspired when Verratti nodded in a perfectly weighted ball from the Frenchman. At times the sheer verve he brought to his work seemed nothing short of miraculous: in one fifty-yard run deep in the second half begun after he’d easily dispossessed no less a figure than Lionel Messi, Dumas dribbled, swerved, pivoted and almost slalomed, before succumbing to a hard, scything tackle from Dani Alves which would have had many a footballer crying foul, before getting up again with a smile instead of an accusatory stare of goggle-eyed incredulity at the referee.

He was like this for the whole game: an unruly, hyperactive, runaway child. Messi and Neymar — who both scored — must have wished that someone would put Ritalin in his half-time water bottle. Even Dumas seemed to recognise that he’d surpassed himself.

When the match was over Jérôme Dumas finally left the pitch with his socks rolled down his wobbling legs and wearing a euphoric grin like some footballing d’Artagnan from the pages of The Three Musketeers, that great French novel written by Jérôme’s more famous namesake, Alexandre Dumas. On the strength of the performance I saw in this match it didn’t seem too much to expect that this young footballer would soon stand alongside the writer in the pantheon of French glory.