For the second year in a row, Paris Saint-Germain crashed out of the UEFA Champions League on away goals, the defending Ligue 1 champ drawing 3-3 with Chelsea after two games, but losing out on thesemifinals thanks to the lone goal Jose Mourinho’s men scored in their 3-1 defeat in Paris last week. Last year, PSG also lost out at the quarterfinal stage on away goals after tyingits two-game series with Barcelona, 2-2.
“There’s disappointment,” Coach Laurent Blanc said following PSG’s 2-0 defeat in London on Tuesday. “You must acknowledgethat we fought a very good Chelsea team.” The World Cup winner with France in 1998 noted that the difference between the teams was slight: “Overall, in my opinion, the difference was not huge.Paris could have gone through but, unfortunately for us, it’s Chelsea who do. But the level of both teams, in my opinion, was very close. Over the two matches there was very little between the twosides — ultimately, though, I think Chelsea’s experience of playing at this level of the competition made the very small difference.”
With star striker ZlatanIbrahimovic missing through injury, PSG’s attack lacked a focal point, although Edinson Cavani, the big Swede’s replacement, spurned a few chances to give histeam a crucial away goal. “I thought we might have scored on the counterattack but we were not able to,” Blanc said, adding: “Chelsea kept believing and in the end they wererewarded…Unfortunately we did not take our chances.”