Lens got humiliated on Wednesday, and no amount of hand-wringing about Como's manners changes who did it to them. Como won 9-1 away in France on November 4, equalling the biggest margin of victory in Champions League history, and the loudest reaction in some corners was to wonder whether the winners should have been nicer about it. That instinct is soft, and it points the finger at the wrong team.
Start with what actually happened on the pitch. Como led 3-0 at the break through a pair from Anastasios Douvikas, then poured in five more during a 22-minute spell after half-time, with Douvikas completing his hat-trick. Ruben Aguilar pulled one back for Lens before 18-year-old Matteo Papaccioli rounded off the night deep into stoppage time. Lens couldn't keep anyone out, and Como made them pay for every lapse.
The case for easing off goes like this: the game was dead, the result was settled, so why keep piling it on a broken opponent? Because this is the Champions League, in a 36-team league phase where goal difference is a live tiebreaker and eight sides go through automatically. Every goal scored at Lens could decide qualification in the spring. Asking a club chasing a top-eight finish to hand back points of goal difference out of sympathy is asking them to compete with one hand behind their back. No elite team owes that to anyone.
Cesc Fabregas has already been down this road, and he hated where it led, which makes the whole debate faintly ridiculous. A couple of weeks before the Lens game, Como beat Manchester United 4-1, and at 4-0 Fabregas told his players to slow the tempo and manage things. United scored a late consolation through Joshua Zirkzee, and Fabregas owned it publicly afterward. "I regret the last ten minutes because I was the one who told the team to slow down the tempo," he said. "I asked the players to stop running and to stay in midfield, and this is what I regret because I was the first to urge them to fight until the end."
The man who tried the merciful thing once, watched it cost him, and said so on the record, then went to Lens and kept his foot down. That's a coach who learned that letting up invites exactly the sloppiness that embarrasses you. Fabregas isn't obliged to blunt his own team twice in a month so a rival defence can save face.
The people who should be squirming are in Lens shirts. Their defending is what's being picked apart across Europe, and the scoreline landed on them because they couldn't stop a thing for 90 minutes. Pretending Como engineered the humiliation lets Lens off the hook for authoring it.
There was one genuinely lovely thread inside the rout. Papaccioli, an Italian-Brazilian teenager who grew up in Como, came on in the second half, scored, and did it on his first senior appearance for the club after recovering from a serious knee injury last season. A kid's debut goal is reason enough to remember this night, better than any lecture about restraint.
After the match, Como sat fourth in the league-phase table with nine points from four games, four still to play. For Lens it was a third straight Champions League defeat and a record loss for a French club. That's on Lens to fix, and Como has nothing to apologize for.
Keep scoring, always. Ask Fabregas what happens when you don't.
