Poch Hammers Three Past CSKA as Nice Run Riot

Three months ago Robert Poch was a name on a loan sheet, a striker borrowed from Juventus for £2.9m with five starts to his name in a Nice shirt and a crowd still unsure what he was for. On Thursday night he walked off the Grand Stade de Nice pitch with the match ball under his arm, a hat-trick in a 4-0 UEFA Europa League win over CSKA-Sofia, and a 9.5 rating that told its own story: seven shots, three on target, four dribbles, three goals. The borrowed man had become the one they came to watch.

It did not take him long. Nice had already gone ahead when Poch took over, and by the time the Bulgarian side's young back line had worked out where he was drifting, the game was gone. CSKA-Sofia started a 16-year-old on the right wing and an 18-year-old at right-back, and Poch spent the evening cutting across them, dropping off the shoulder of Christian Becerra and spinning in behind. He scored three, and the ruthless part is that he might have had more.

The supporting cast was loud. Bryan Fonteneau, drafted into midfield for the absent Diarmuid Healy-Byrne, set up one goal and played four key passes, running 13.3 kilometres. Jorge Salazar matched that distance and added an assist of his own. José María Torres got a goal from centre-back, 54 passes from 62, and that was the pattern of the night: Nice with 64% of the ball, 20 shots, nine on target, five clear-cut chances, against a CSKA-Sofia side that managed no clear-cut chance at all and an expected-goals figure of 0.45. The visitors hit the woodwork once, through their best moment, but by then the noise was all one way.

CSKA-Sofia's evening had the look of a lesson. Five yellow cards, 25 fouls, a back line reshuffled at half-time, Hristo Bogdanov dropping from centre-back into midfield, Zahari Nikolov pushed forward. Svetoslav Kostadinov made 12 clearances in goal and still picked the ball out four times. On the touchline their bench could only watch Poch's third go in and the home end behind the goal spill over itself.

What it means is simple and it is big for Nice: a European night won with room to spare, a squad missing a regular midfielder and still playing through the lines with ease, and a striker who has now scored six goals in seven games for the club. The loan from Juventus was framed as a stopgap in July. It is starting to look like the best piece of business on the Côte d'Azur. "He gives us something we did not have," was how one of the Nice staff put it afterwards, and nobody in the ground was arguing.

The old ones in the stand remember the nights when Europe came to the Riviera and the opposition were the ones dictating terms. This was the other way round. Poch and his team-mates did not just win; they made a 4-0 look like the natural order of things, and the crowd sang about a hat-trick long after the whistle. The next European evening cannot come quickly enough, and neither can the next sight of that number ten running at a defence that already knows it is beaten.