Dortmund bring down curtain on Kylian Mbappé’s lost years at PSG

Farewell then, project superstar. By the end of this Champions League semi-final second leg it seemed oddly fitting that the final act across 180 minutes should be Kylian Mbappé falling over his own feet.

Mbappé was through on goal at the time, the most beautifully balanced footballer on the planet haring away from a clutch of yellow shirts in emergency battery mode, then slipping over on the Parc des Princes turf just as the final whistle was blown.

This, then, would be the final act of Mbappé’s final European game in Paris, and by extension the last significant note of six years as the sun king of the Qatari sport project.

A 2-0 aggregate defeat by the fifth-best team in Germany has its own kind of poetry, its own kind of bathos. But Dortmund were also magnificent here, defending for the final half-hour like men tied together on the deck of a sinking ship, and entirely deserving of another Wembley final in this competition.

They were lucky too. Paris hit the bar and the post four times. But they were also oddly under-stretched, waiting to be dragged into those terrible places Mbappé will take you, but never quite getting there.

Instead Mbappé spent long periods moving around the edges of this game, glimpsed vaguely through the blur of other people playing football. Paris had been a lovely soft mild place on Tuesday afternoon, the Parc surrounded by pyro-wielding hordes hours before kick-off, and the noise inside relentless from the stand occupied by its ultras.

But by the end here it was hard to avoid a sense that the entire game in between embodied the colder, stranger elements of Mbappé’s PSG career. Magnificent staging. Fawningly overwrought buildup. Cinematic moments, regal closeups. For 90 minutes talent existed