Marseille beat Strasbourg 4-0 in the opening round of Ligue 1's regular season at the CEPAC Vélodrome on Thursday evening. The hosts ran out comfortable winners as the visitors struggled to find any foothold after going down to ten men. By then the shape of the game had been set.
Amin Gouiri broke the deadlock after the interval with a well-taken goal in the forty-sixth minute. The match turned in the fifty-ninth minute when Samir El Mourabet was sent off for Strasbourg. And here's the thing — the visitors simply could not recover from that blow.
Igor Paixão won a penalty on the hour mark and Gouiri put it away, then immediately collected another spot-kick two minutes later to complete his hat-trick. The visitors had already made three changes by then, including both yellow-card winners Samuel Amo-Ameyaw and Sékou Mara. Kheïreddine Abdallah added a fifth in the eighty-ninth minute and Pierre-Emile Højbjerg made it 4-0 with two goals in stoppage time.
The statistics tell the story without elaboration. Marseille held 67 per cent possession and registered eight shots on target against Strasbourg's two. The hosts created three big chances while the visitors managed none, and their expected goals figure of 0.18 tells you everything about the quality of chances on offer.
Both sides sit on three points after two games, Marseille eighth and Strasbourg tenth, so the table hardly moves in either direction. What this match showed was how quickly a game can unravel when the wheels come off early. The hosts will take confidence from the performance, but it is too soon to draw any real conclusions from a first-round fixture.