In the French Cup on Monday, Paris Saint-Germain thrashed sixth-tier amateur minnows Pays de Cassel 7-0, with Kylian Mbappe becoming the club’s first player to score five goals in a single game.
Mbappe, who scored a hat-trick in France’s World Cup final loss to Argentina little over a month ago, scored a hat-trick in this match, giving PSG a 4-0 halftime lead over their opponents from the regional league.
He scored twice more after the break, and PSG’s other goals in the round of 32 came from Neymar and Carlos Soler.
The club, which is owned by Qatar and has more French Cup victories than any other side, will now play away to fierce rivals Marseille in the round of 16 early in the next month.
In only one week, on the week of February 6, Bayern Munich will visit PSG for the first leg of their Champions League round-of-16 match.
As soon as we scored the first goal, it got harder for our adversaries, PSG manager Christophe Galtier told the media.
The opponents we’ll be up against in the next weeks are of a different calibre, he continued.
Lionel Messi was given the day off and permitted to sit out this match, which was played in front of a packed house at the 38,000-seat Stade Bollaert-Delelis in Lens. Mbappe was awarded the captain’s armband while Neymar also started.
“Mbappe Shines as PSG Crushes Pays de Cassel in French Cup, Tying Record for Most Goals in the Competition”
Despite being a little club from a few small towns inland from the port city of Dunkirk in far northern France, Pays de Cassel’s extraordinary progress through the competition has piqued the curiosity of the entire area.
They played well early on against the Ligue 1 leaders, but just before the half-hour mark, Mbappe turned in a Nuno Mendes cutback, the ball taking a critical deflection on its way in, breaking their defence.
Then, after setting up Neymar to score his first goal since the World Cup, Mbappe lobbed in his team’s third goal and then finished off a 12-minute hat-trick off a feed from Vitinha.
A goalkeeping error in the 56th minute was followed by Mbappe’s fourth and PSG’s fifth goals.
Before Mbappe completed the onslaught with his fifth goal of the game to tie the record for most French Cup goals ever, Neymar set up Soler to backheel in for 6-0 to start the scoring.
He has already surpassed the former star of Marseille Jean-Pierre Papin in the scoring department with 29 goals in the competition.