It was the last minute of stoppage time and Mats Hummels was doing what he does best: leading.
Ousmane Dembele received possession 25 yards from goal and Hummels had his left arm outstretched, gesturing to Ian Maatsen, the Borussia Dortmund left-back, to be aware of Achraf Hakimi on Paris Saint-Germain’s right.
All the while, Hummels kept his eyes on Dembele.
When the PSG winger shaped to shoot before chopping inside, Hummels planted his left foot and, unlike so many defenders in the modern era, never turned his back on the ball. Instead, he stretched out his right leg — he was spread-eagled now — and stopped Dembele in his tracks.
Yet another PSG attack had been repelled by a centre-back who won seven duels (ranked joint first) and four tackles (joint first) against PSG in Tuesday night’s Champions League semi-final second leg, and also made 10 clearances (first) and three interceptions (first). Oh, and he scored the only goal of the game, too, to give Dortmund a 1-0 win on the night and 2-0 victory on aggregate.
Aged 35, Hummels was the standout player across both legs, earning him the official man-of-the-match awards in Paris and Dortmund, and taking the club that means so much to him into the third Champions League final in their history.
“Not many people thought this was close to possible,” Hummels said.
It is quite a story and Hummels’ part in it — he is surely nailed on to be in the Champions League team of the season — seems to have taken everybody by surprise.
“I’ve got to mention Mats Hummels,” Thierry Henry, the former Arsenal and Barcelona striker who is now working as a pundit for CBS Sports, said after Dortmund’s victory. “When he left Bayern Munich, everyone was like, ‘He’s done. That’s it. Time over for him’. You have to give him a lot of credit. I would never have said that going back to Dortmund he would have been playing at that level now.”
In many ways, though, this version of Hummels is exactly what Dortmund had in mind when they re-signed him from Bayern Munich for £35million ($43.7m) in the summer of 2019.
Hans-Joachim Watzke, the Dortmund CEO, told The Athletic at the time that bringing Hummels back was about much more than adding a player with experience and an elite mentality.
“There is also his superb aerial ability and his quality on the ball — you’ll hardly find a centre-back who’s this present, always ready to collect a ball and able to play out high-risk passes from the back. They often open up the game and create opportunities. He’s outstanding, in that sense.”
Hummels showed all of that and more against PSG. There was some old-school tackling, typically flamboyant passes, brilliant defensive positioning to snuff out danger and a forehead that seemed to have a magnetic attraction to the ball.
More than anything, Hummels looked like he was enjoying himself.
How else do you explain the hop, skip and jump that he did before, during and after playing that gorgeous pass with the outside of his foot to Karim Adeyemi in the first leg?
That Mats Hummels pass 😮💨#UCL | 📺 @tntsports & @discoveryplusUK pic.twitter.com/Bz2cUmjYiM
— Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) May 1, 2024
It was a passage of play that started deep inside his half. As the Dortmund goalkeeper Gregor Kobel passed out from the back, Hummels scanned and saw the space that had opened up towards the centre circle.
In what felt like a role reversal, Hummels glided past PSG winger Bradley Barcola…
… leaving him prone…
… and then drifted inside and beautifully swerved a right-footed pass out to Adeyemi on the Dortmund left.
That both feet were off the floor after Hummels made contact with the ball added to the majesty of the pass. Whether that was necessary from a technical point of view, only Hummels knows.
Either way, it looked good.
The beauty of Hummels is that he has the brawn to go with the brain, as Kylian Mbappe discovered last week in Dortmund. With his back to goal inside his own half, Mbappe received a pass into his feet and made the fatal error of blindly turning inside.
Hummels, who was five yards behind Mbappe initially, read the attacker’s intentions and, in football parlance, ‘took the lot’.
The German won the ball, Mbappe went up in the air, and the Westfalenstadion roared. Who says that tackling is dead?
Mbappe, to his credit, got straight to his feet, but was then so disorientated that he did a full 360-degree turn to try to re-establish which way PSG were kicking. By that time, Hummels had calmly headed the loose ball to Julian Brandt.
💪@matshummels || #UCL pic.twitter.com/IdIEpLXAhL
— UEFA Champions League (@ChampionsLeague) May 6, 2024
That coolness is such a fundamental part of Hummels’ game. Naturally right-footed, he is totally comfortable clipping a ball with his left foot to beat an aggressive opposition press, as he did several times against PSG in the first leg to release Julian Ryerson, the Dortmund right-back.
Or, in contrast, playing a pitching wedge pass with his right foot to take five PSG players out of the game, pick out Brandt and launch an attack.
There is a lot to like about Hummels as a person as well as a footballer. A journalist’s dream because he loves to talk, he speaks English better than most English people and, on top of that, he has a sense of humour.
High on life after Dortmund defeated Atletico Madrid in the Champions League quarter-finals a few weeks ago, Hummels revelled in the sight of two other Bundesliga clubs (Bayern Munich and Bayer Leverkusen) progressing to European semi-finals while Arsenal, Manchester City and West Ham United were eliminated.
“Good harvesting this week my fellow farmers” the German tweeted. The post went viral and Dortmund got in on the act, too.
Hard day’s work 🧑🌾 https://t.co/a4eHwmAp4O pic.twitter.com/THEKAzfaIN
— Borussia Dortmund (@BlackYellow) April 19, 2024
Hummels, who is out of contract in the summer, was trending again on Tuesday night but this time, it was purely down to how he played on the pitch and him delivering the game’s defining moment.
It felt fitting that the corner from which Hummels scored was won via some excellent attacking play from Nico Schlotterbeck, his fellow centre-back. Schlotterbeck, who has had his critics and lost his place in the Germany squad, was hugely impressive across both legs, too.
As for Hummels’ goal, the way he looked at Lucas Beraldo, his marker, just before heading home Brandt’s corner, made you almost feel sorry for the 20-year-old PSG defender.
“Young centre-back versus experienced centre-back and he gets bullied,” said Rio Ferdinand, the TNT Sports pundit.
It was Hummels’ fifth Champions League goal and it took the game away from PSG. “That’s what you train for — these moments,” Hummels said. “It gave us a little bit of breathing space.”
Aside from surviving a penalty appeal for a foul on Dembele, the one occasion Hummels appeared uncomfortable in Paris was when Marco Reus, the only other survivor from the Dortmund team that lost to Bayern Munich in the Champions League final in 2013, interrupted a post-match interview by hitting his team-mate in the chest.
“He’s stronger than you think!” Hummels said, flinching.
The road to redemption awaits the pair of them at Wembley next month.
GO DEEPER
Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League final? It is a great story that nobody saw coming
(Top photo: Hendrik Deckers/Borussia Dortmund via Getty Images)
