Paris Saint-Germain coach Laurent Blanc has said Zlatan Ibrahimovic should never have been in his matchday squad, let alone able to make a contribution to the French champions' 2-0 victory over Marseille.
After being sidelined with a heel injury since September, Ibrahimovic, 33, came off the bench with 24 minutes of Sunday's classique remaining and was at the heart of the move that led to Edinson Cavani scoring PSG's second goal.
Speculation had suggested that the Sweden captain would start the game and make his 100th competitive appearance for PSG, but Blanc told reporters that the player should really have been watching the match from the Parc des Princes stands.
"He's intelligent. He knew very well that he couldn't play for more than 30 minutes, and only at the end of the game," Blanc was quoted as saying by Foot 365.
"He trained with us for the last few days because it's Ibra and we wanted to take a psychological advantage for the game.
"The only risk I took was to include him in the squad because, after only two days work with the ball, he shouldn't even be in the squad. I didn't want to play him, and he understood that very well."
Blanc, whose team started the game four points behind Marseille at the top of the Ligue 1 table, went in front through an opportunistic Lucas Moura strike seven minutes before half-time, before Cavani headed home on 85 minutes.
"It's good he [Cavani] scored, because goal-scorers look at how many goals they score," Blanc, who has deployed the former Napoli forward in a central role during Ibrahimovic's absence, said.
"He is on a good run, and I think the presence of Ibrahimovic means he will perhaps score even more goals."
With PSG -- who remain Ligue 1's only unbeaten side this season -- picking up momentum after a fourth successive league win, Marseille now sit just one point ahead of their rivals at the top of the table.
The visitors failed to make the most of a fine start in which they threatened to open the scoring before eventually succumbing as PSG upped their game.
"It hurts to lose the classique. And it's not good not to have kept the lead we had in the table," Marseille coach Marcelo Bielsa, whose side were seven points ahead of PSG just four games ago, told reporters.
"The result seems fair to me. We were better in the first half, even though PSG led 1-0 at half-time. The second was more even, but we lacked clarity up front."
The defeat was Marseille's second in three matches, with the first of those coming at Lyon, who are now third and just two points off the top.
"The performance against Lyon was much better than that today," Bielsa, who saw midfielder Giannelli Imbula sent off before Cavani struck, said.
"This evening, we put in a lot of effort to keep the match evenly balanced. In the first half we should have been in front, I think, but in the second half we progressively lost our ability to play better than our opponents."