Kvaratskhelia is perfect attacking scalpel for PSG’s surgical brilliance. Arsenal, beware | Barney Ronay

Give him all the players. Luxuriate also in France’s unmatched coaching and development culture. There were four French players in the PSG team, and two in Bayern’s. Luis Enrique’s team press and rat. They can control with slow possession-ball. They can score from set pieces. The real difference, though, comes in the vertiginous quality of their attackers.

Luis Enrique hails the travelling fans after the match. Photograph: Angelika Warmuth/Reuters

Bukayo Saka, for example, is a very good player. But he’s not at the level of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia for trickery and imagination, or Dembélé when it comes to two-footed speed and grace, or even the extreme dribbling facility of Désiré Doué.

These really are hand-picked attacking scalpels, perfectly balanced, primed to do only two things: press like maniacs when you have the ball, and only go forward when they have it, freed up by an unceasing blizzard of counter-pressing at their backs.

Bayern’s right side told that story here. It took two minutes and 20 seconds to rip it open. Fabián Ruiz set Kvaratskhelia away with a lovely clipped pass. The cross to Dembélé was just right. He pinged the ball into the roof of the net. It was an excellent goal, a set move that reduced Bayern to an arrangement of cones.

But Bayern’s right-back, taken out of the move early on, was Konrad Laimer. Laimer was a kind of spirit animal pick here, the Bayern-geist player and team factotum. He’s a good player, but he’s not a proper right-back, let alone an elite one. Watching him try to shut down Kvaratskhelia here was like seeing a normal human man up against an attack made up of hyper-skilled futuristic aliens.

Laimer will have left the Allianz Arena whirling around every 10 steps looking for Kvaratskhelia, checking he isn’t already in the back seat of his car, or lounging feet-up on his sofa when he flicks the lights on at home, already eating his last pot of frozen yoghurt.

So what do Arsenal do about this? Before the tie Vincent Kompany said you can’t beat PSG by defending. Kompany was up on his touchline from the start, decked out in black baseball cap and silly bomber jacket like a celebrity Las Vegas bodyguard. And he was right but also wrong. Bayern can’t beat PSG by defending, because they don’t keep clean sheets, don’t reel themselves in, don’t compromise. Well, we know someone who will do that.

Arsenal are the best defensive team in Europe. So defend then. Spoil. Reel off the greatest display yet of passive-aggressive suffocation-ball. It will require elite levels of concentration and also luck. But PSG do have some defensive frailties when pressed hard, and Bayern should have had a penalty for handball. Pound the set pieces. Try to win it 1-0.

No doubt the purists will hold their perfumed ‘kerchiefs to their noses if this happens, will claim that only a kind of free-running TikTok reel style can really be called entertaining football. But they would of course be wrong. This is the beauty of the game. It’s supposed to be difficult, monotonous at times. Its sublime moments carved out of genuine resistance. PSG are the best team in Europe. But there would be no better way to prove it than by applying their creative brilliance to an Arsenal team that makes them sweat for every inch.