Photo: Collected
Kylian Mbappe will not get his dream farewell from Paris Saint-Germain after their shock Champions League exit at the hands of Borussia Dortmund on Tuesday (7 May) deprived him of playing his last game for the club in the final at Wembley next month.
The 2018 World Cup winner will leave PSG after seven years when his contract expires at the end of this season, with Real Madrid his likely next destination.
He had hoped to sign off by leading the Qatar-owned club to Champions League glory for the first time in their history, and they were the favourites to see off Dortmund at the Parc des Princes in the semi-final second leg.
But they failed to overturn a one-goal first-leg deficit, with Mats Hummels scoring the only goal on the night to give Dortmund a 2-0 aggregate victory.
Mbappe was one of four PSG players to hit the woodwork in the second half, and coach Luis Enrique complained his side -- who had 31 attempts on goal -- had been "unlucky".
"I don't really like to talk about bad luck," Mbappe said a short while later.
"When you are good, you don't hit the post, you score. I tried to help the best I could. When I say we needed to be more clinical, I am the one who has to be scoring. But this is life, we need to pick ourselves up."
It will be hard for PSG to do that, given how close they were to reaching the final for the second time, four years on from their defeat against Bayern Munich in Lisbon.
That will forever remain as close as Mbappe came to lifting the European Cup with his hometown team, for whom he is their all-time top scorer with 255 goals.
A total of 42 of those have come in Europe's elite club competition, but he could not add to that tally across the two legs against Dortmund.
"The end of his dream" was the headline in sports daily L'Equipe, which gave a scathing assessment of the France captain's performance, awarding him a mark of two out of 10.
Messenger/Disha
