Paris: Borussia Dortmund reached their third Champions League final after Mats Hummels’ header earned the visitors a 1-0 win against misfiring Paris St Germain for a deserved 2-0 aggregate win on Tuesday.
Hummels headed home from a corner to send the Germans to Wembley, into their first final in Europe’s top club competition since 2013.
Luis Enrique’s PSG hit the woodwork four times but failed to find the net.
Dortmund had a better chance in the 35th, after a sharp counter attack led by Karim Adeyemi, but was denied by PSG’s Gianluigi Donnarumma pulling off a brilliant save.The home side were lucky the score on the night was level at halftime.
PSG stepped up after the break with Warren Zaire Emery’s shot hitting the outside of the post after Mbappe’s attempt was deflected.
But Dortmund were more clinical as Hummels headed home from Julian Brandt’s corner five minutes into the second half and not only secured their win but doubled the German side’s advantage over the two legs.
The end of his dream!
Kylian Mbappe will not get his dream farewell from PSG after their shock Champions League exit
Kylian Mbappe would have dreamed of lifting the Champions League trophy for his final European act as a Paris St-Germain player. The reality was very different.
Instead, Mbappe’s final moment in the competition for PSG had him slipping over as he chased a lost cause, a through ball he was never going to reach, in a game which was by that point beyond the Parisians.
That slip in the final seconds of injury time came as Borussia Dortmund’s 2-0 aggregate victory was safe and sealed following a stout defensive display full of energetic pressing, helped by a sizeable slice of luck.
And it was a slip that provides the final word in one of the most disappointing eras of modern European football – PSG’s star-studded but unsuccessful hunt for the Champions League. 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.
“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.
Being knocked out by the team who sit fifth in the Bundesliga looks like a disaster for a club who have invested as much as PSG over the years since the Qatari takeover of 2011.
It is the latest in a long line of huge disappointments in the Champions League knockout rounds, still headed by their 6-1 defeat by Barcelona in the last 16 in 2017 after they won the first leg 4-0.
“PSG hit their heads against the glass ceiling on a night when the sky seemed to be the limit,” reflected Vincent Duluc in L’Equipe.
“The truth is that this elimination is quite the collapse given the gigantic opportunity that was on offer.”