If Pep Guardiola took over a Sunday league team, he’d lose his first game in charge 7-0. He’d lose the second game 15-0 and call it progress. What’s interesting is he might be right.
The inherited brilliance of his Barcelona and Bayern Munich teams concealed some important things about Pep Guardiola the football manager. The first being just how bloody long it takes to grasp his system. It took four years for John Stones to become a Guardiola player. Gabriel Jesus might never get there.
There is no Plan B. That’s abundantly clear. The plan is the plan. The ball is your daughter’s chastity. The last vaccine in the care home. It doesn’t matter if it’s bobbling and Liverpool’s front three are swarming all over you; find a pass. It doesn’t matter if Jamie Vardy is charging full pelt and your self-assessment is overdue; find a pass. Clear your lines and you’ll find yourself clearing your locker.
Other leeways will be granted. It isn’t an enormous issue if you’re a defender that can’t actually defend, for instance. Stick to the plan and you might never need to. If you’re a midfielder, you don’t necessarily even need to be able to run. And while it’s a bonus if the goalkeeper can stop shots, let’s just say Pep has more holistic plans in mind for you. You can see now why Guardiola didn’t give club legend Joe Hart even a cursory ten games at the start of his reign to prove he was completely ill-equipped for the road ahead. Dropping him at the outset was an act of mercy.
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Football used to be about space and finding the stuff. Guardiola has collapsed this theory quite literally. His players don’t spread out, they coalesce. The temptation might be to think of Paul Scholes as a sort of archetypal Guardiola player, but those 35 yard cross-field balls of soaring beauty would have landed Scholes training with Benjamin Mendy and the reserves. Sexless three metre passes are the order of the day; shorter if you can manage it. Triple-A, risk-free balls to one of the two nearest options. The exciting thing is this remains true even if you’re in your own crowded six yard box.
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I used to reflect on how hard City had to work to score a goal under Guardiola and compare it to how cheaply they gave them away, but I’m beginning to think this is just a necessary by-product. When it goes wrong the Guardiola way, it blows up pretty quickly. In his first year at Eastlands, when they finished 3rd, City were conceding the sort of goals that would catch cameramen out. The footage would still be of a replay or a close-up when the ball hit the back of the net. City would require a 47-pass move to equalise. The same is still true today really, it’s just that City are managing to do an awful lot more of the latter than the former.
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I think you have to already be one of the best teams in the league to play the way Guardiola wants. I really don’t think you get away with pushing your luck this far if you’re 16th in the table. Even at the Emirates, Mikel Arteta is steadily extricating Arsenal from the high table of English football trying to implement Pep’s ethos. The Guardiola method is a finishing school for excellence rather than a general manual on how to play the game. For most teams, it would be like a normal human trying to use an Olympic standard pole vault; it won’t work and you’re going to hurt yourself trying.
That’s not an issue for Guardiola though. After a quick practice with the reserves, he started managerial life with Messi, Xavi and Iniesta. He inherited a Bayern team that had just won the treble and his next move was to the Manchester branch of a sovereign wealth fund. We’re unlikely to ever know what he’d do with Burnley.
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What is true is his Manchester City team are starting to look like the best side in Europe at the moment. A sort of Mancunian Harlem Globetrotters who you feel are a fit De Bruyne and Aguero away from their best tilt at the big prize.
In this system that requires the greatest level of nerve, the test will be how well Guardiola’s outfit handle the big occasions in Europe this year. It will be interesting to see just how solid those six yard box rondos really are in the last 30 minutes of a big European final. Mourinho-style pragmatism football is tailored to cope with this kind of pressure, alleviate it as best as possible. By design, Guardiola’s system does not allow this luxury. The players cannot put the burden down. That’s not the plan. They just have to learn to handle it.
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England goalkeeper Joe Hart was keen to meet the new gaffer and understand his plans.
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