Stopwatches at the ready. Coming to Burgundy on Friday, it's the fixture that always starts briskly, heads in only one direction and ends horribly for the underdogs. Dijon versus Paris Saint-Germain – last against first in Ligue 1, the emblem of a league drained of competitive suspense.
In their last four meetings with Dijon, the French champions have scored 19 goals to Dijon’s none. In the most recent punch-bagging, the hosts were 2-0 up after four minutes. The longest Dijon held out? That was in Cup in February, when the stopwatch ran all the way to the eighth minute before PSG put themselves ahead, with the first of three.
The previous season, the juggernaut started rolling after four minutes. That day nobody put a foot on the brakes: PSG 8, Dijon 0, with Neymar scoring four but still booed because he insisted on taking a late penalty rather than allow Edinson Cavani the chance from the spot to make himself PSG’s all-time leading goalscorer.
Cavani passed that landmark promptly enough and will regard tonight’s trip as an opportunity to move close to the next milestone. The Uruguayan is five shy of 200 goals for PSG. He always scores against Dijon. Angel Di Maria has a particular taste for this opposition too: six goals and three assists in the last four thrashings. The bad news for Dijon is that Di Maria has been in electric form.
The difficulty for PSG manager Thomas Tuchel is how to decipher real form when domestic tasks are so straightforward. PSG actually had a relatively bumpy start to the defence of their sixth Ligue 1 title of the last seven years, losing twice in their opening seven games. But any damage is absorbed into a thick cushion. A win at Dijon would put PSG 11 points clear of second-placed Nantes.
The comparisons with the leagues that France likes to measure its own against is stark. In the era of the superclub, PSG are not alone for a long run of domestic success.
Bayern Munich and Juventus have impeccable back-to-back title sequences, seven and eight on the trot. But they are kept on edge as they seek to extend those runs.
This weekend, any one of five German clubs could go top of the Bundesliga. In Serie A, Juve lead Internazionale only by a point. In La Liga, the top five are knotted together. In the Premier League Liverpool’s lead looks lordly, but a six-point advantage over champions Manchester City must be viewed through the lens of the one-point gap that separated the two clubs through a gripping race in 2018-19.
PSG, though, need a telescope to find their likeliest challengers. Nantes are a refreshing storyline and scored eight goals in the League Cup in midweek. But the signs are their Ligue 1 momentum slipping; they have lost their last two league games.
Yet they are still second in a table where Olympique Lyonnais, with the second biggest budget in Ligue 1 – €310m (Dh1.2 bn) to PSG’s €637m – sit 13th.
Lille, last season’s runners-up, are third, but have dropped points in three of their last four. As for Olympique Marseille, last weekend PSG applied to French football’s most resonant rivalry the sort of scorn they tend to show Dijon.
PSG went into half-time 4-0 up against Marseille with the crowd still cheering a move that had begun with PSG goalkeeper Keylor Navas volleying his way through passing triangles with his defenders on the edge of his six-yard box, leading to the fourth goal.
Meanwhile Monaco, who heroically beat PSG to the title in 2016-17, are in the bottom half of the division, watching wistfully as Kylian Mbappe, the superstar teenager who emerged in their colours that season, propels PSG out of sight, impatient for a future beyond the Ligue 1 that, at only 20, he has outgrown.
The plain fact is that the second strongest team in Ligue 1 are not among the other 19 clubs. The second best team, by a distance, are PSG ‘B’, and any suspense around this French title race is focused on how skilfully Tuchel soothes the various superstars who find themselves off the ‘A’ list.
At the moment, Mbappe, Mauro Icardi, signed on loan from Inter, and Di Maria are forming a superb front three – 13 goals between them in the last three games – while Cavani itches to move up the hierarchy. So do Julian Draxler, the Germany international, and Pablo Sarabia, the Spain winger. And there is Neymar, soon to return from injury.
“We have no defined first XI,” said Tuchel ahead of the trip to Dijon, “and we are going to need all our squad.” He was too professional to add that on Friday he may only need two or three of them at full pelt for about 10 minutes.
