Winners and losers: PSG's heroes impress, except Zlatan Ibrahimovic

A year ago, a 3-1 win in the first leg of their quarter-final against Chelsea was not enough. With Zlatan Ibrahimovic absent, PSG conceded a first-half strike to André Schuerrle and, despite a battling display, suffered heartbreak when Demba Ba sent Jose Mourinho’s side through on away goals.

The odds looked to be stacked even more heavily against the Ligue 1 champions this time out – especially after the first leg, when they failed to translate an impressive display into victory at the Parc des Princes. Winning in London in a knockout tie against a Mourinho side? Bonne chance, mes amis.

And yet Laurent Blanc must have been praying to the right god, because on Wednesday night the unthinkable happened.

PSG were giants at Stamford Bridge. They were titans, warriors and monsters. Use whatever overblown metaphor you feel appropriate; from the moment Ibrahimovic was sent off (we’ll come back to him later) until the final whistle put Chelsea’s cowed charges out of their misery over two hours later, Blanc’s men were magnificent.

As Mourinho’s players strolled around as if the world owed them a living, PSG hustled and harried: Blaise Matuidi zipped around the midfield like a wind-up toy; Edinson Cavani did his share of the pressing and then all the running Zlatan probably wouldn’t have bothered doing anyway. In midfield, Thiago Motta solved all the problems Marco Verratti seems to so revel in creating.

Then there were the centre-backs, Mr Revenge and Mr Redemption. David Luiz came back to haunt his former club with a controlled display capped with a goal, before Thiago Silva lost his mind, relocated it and lost it all over again when his stunning, clock-stopping header hit the net.

The PSG players celebrated as if they had won the thing, all bear hugs and bleary eyes. Blanc, meanwhile, wondered round like he had seen a ghost; perhaps it was the spectre of a defeat that he expected but somehow shimmied away from.

There are a handful of strikers in the world who have had the enormous misfortune of playing in the Messi-Ronaldo era of ludicrous, sustained goalscoring; players who would have had stadiums named after them in other decades but whose stars are outshone by You Know Who and The Other One, whichever way you prefer them.

Take the handful of forwards who have passed through Real Madrid in the last few years as a case in point. Gonzalo Higuain: by most measures a superb striker, capable of winning games single-handedly and plundering 20-30 goals a season, yet not Cristiano Ronaldo. Karim Benzema: possibly the most complete number nine on the continent, but again, not Cristiano Ronaldo, and thus perhaps forever destined to be on the shortlist for the chopping block.

Klaas-Jan Huntelaar – whose Real career lasted just six months – is probably one rung below that pair but gave a thrilling reminder of his powers at the Bernabeu on Tuesday night. Alongside the lively youngster Leroy Sané, Huntelaar put on a masterclass in intelligent forward play, linking with the midfield and pulling into space in front of and behind the home defence.

His first goal was all about anticipation: the striker saw the possibility of a chance before it even arose like a veteran chess master. His second came at the end of a classic diagonal run off the shoulder of the last man and was finished emphatically.

At 31, Huntelaar’s chance to prove himself at one of Europe’s biggest clubs might have already come and gone, but it was good to see one of the great marksmen show his former employers that he still has plenty in the locker.

“Hey guys. About Tuesday night… I know we had that match scheduled but we’ve decided just to hire some cameras with high definition slo-mo and hold our own private Goal of the Month competition at the Dragão. That cool?”

Football is not a place for nice people. A stoical smile can win you admirers, sure, but this racket tends to reward the schemer, the cut-throat cynic and the egomaniac. You can see it in the face of Manuel Pellegrini, the friendly grandfather of Manchester City. You can read it between the lines in Juan Mata's diligent weekly blogs about games he didn't play in.

You can also hear it in the voice of Carlo Ancelotti, a man upon whom football currently seems to be playing a particularly dastardly trick. The Italian, you might remember, led Real Madrid to La Decima less than a year ago, breaking a hoodoo that lasted 12 years and thwarted no fewer than 10 of his predecessors. He should have plenty of credit in the bank.

But expectations at the Bernabeu are so inflated that Ancelotti's position is far from secure. His cause will not have been helped by Tuesday night's game, when all of his side's recent issues – the defensive fragility; the lack of fluency in attack; Iker Casillas – came to the fore. And then there was the pouting of Cristiano Ronaldo, who appears desperate to absolve himself of responsibility by sheer force of will.

Ancelotti will respond as he always does: by staying calm, raising his eyebrow and getting down to work. But sometimes – and at some clubs – that's not always enough.

There are two broad schools of thought on the mercurial Swede. Some deify him on the basis of his (undoubtedly alluring) combination of brute physicality, technical skill and quotability, perhaps not quite grasping the extent to which the latter has been shaped by publicists over the years.

For others, he is the ultimate charlatan, a flake who never does it on the big occasion and has stumbled from success to success through brute luck rather than judgement.

The truth is somewhere in the middle, of course, but Ibra did his legion of haters a favour on Wednesday evening. The forward was a spectator at Stamford Bridge – both figuratively, as he drifted through the opening stages, and then literally, after his red card.

The sending-off may have been harsh (and he certainly had a point about Chelsea's 'babies') but what a gut wrench it must have been for Zlatan to see his team-mates perform such heroics in his absence. In fact, PSG arguably looked a better side with 10 men than they had with their supposed talisman on the pitch for the opening half hour.