Ferran Torres bails out PSG with a brace as Rennes fight to a 2-2 draw

Rennes jumped out to a 2-0 lead in just 37 minutes and came close to pulling off one of the shocks of the weekend in Ligue 1. But Paris Saint-Germain, which got almost everything wrong in the first half and almost everything right in the second, found a way back thanks to two goals from Ferran Torres to leave the final score at 2-2 at Roazhon Park.

The home side started better than anyone could have expected. In the 8th minute, Sebastian Szymanski received the ball from Adrien Thomasson off a counterattack and curled a left-footed shot from outside the box into the top corner: 1-0 before PSG had even settled in. The Parisian side answered with persistent pressure (shots from Doue, Kvaratskhelia and Joao Neves that missed the target) but it was Rennes who struck again before the break: in the 37th minute, Esteban Lepaul connected with a cross from Przemyslaw Frankowski to make it 2-0 at halftime.

The Parisian response

In the second half, PSG changed gears. Ferran Torres and Mika Godts came on at the break and the team began generating more danger with crosses and runs down the right from Hakimi and Fabian Ruiz. The first real warning sign came in the 70th minute: Fabian Ruiz set up Torres, who finished with his right foot from the center of the box to make it 2-1, a goal that needed a VAR review before it was confirmed. Eleven minutes later, in the 81st minute, Torres struck again, this time with a header off another Fabian Ruiz cross, completing his brace and sealing the final 2-2 draw.

Rennes, having used its final substitutions on Al Tamari, Nagida and Szymanski, held on as best it could in the closing minutes, including a stoppage-time shot from Ludovic Blas that failed to find the net.

The numbers behind PSG's dominance

The statistics make clear the gap in possession, though they also explain how Rennes managed to strike twice in such a short span: the goals came from a counterattack and a cross into the box, not from sustained buildup play.

PSG tripled its opponent's possession and doubled its shot total, but struggled to turn that dominance into goals until well into the second half. According to our estimate based on the match's shots, PSG generated 1.765 expected goals to Rennes' 0.976, a gap that confirms the visitors' greater offensive output, though the final score ended up far tighter than those numbers suggest.

Far from the projections

Before kickoff, our model gave Paris Saint-Germain a 63% chance of winning, against just 16% for Rennes and 21% for a draw, with a projected expected-goals split of 2.32 for the visitors and 1.15 for the home side. Reality took a different course: Rennes scored two early goals that were not part of the script, and PSG needed the entire second half to salvage a result that had looked far more comfortable for the Parisians beforehand.

What the draw means

With this result, both teams sit on 1 point at the start of Ligue 1, with just one match played in the competition so far, so the table standings say little for now. For Rennes, splitting the points against the defending champion feels close to a win given how the match unfolded. For PSG, Ferran Torres' brace averts a defeat that, based on how the first half went, had come dangerously close to happening.