Last night in Istanbul, quiet and undramatic, the heritage of Pep Guardiola changed its course. Until the night he came the only director to claim the treble doubly, in two different leagues and distinctly different ages too, elaborating the enormity of achievement, his defining image was defined in Barcelona, as the dominie of football’s most radical idea of this century. To burn this image, to surpass the peak he gauged in Barcelona, he demanded to produce a commodity more spectacular, a commodity further Elysian and immortal. He achieved this by installing an identity to a club that has sagged in the lower rungs of the top division, their success frequently measured by surviving the deportation dread, stitching an identity and breathing soul into a conglomerate erected on petrodollars.
The megacity was compactly successful before in the there-Guardiola period too, but he turned the terrain into a conglomerate.
In Barcelona, he was special, he was loved and praised. It was his home, also his soul and spirit. But he was an heir of a noble tradition of football intellectualists and visionaries, his ideals forged in their grand tradition. But he was just one of them, a band of fabulous names that beautify the walls of the major club. There was heritage and history, their gospel inscribed in gravestones nearly half a century agone and chiselled to near perfection in the ultramodern period. At City, he'd make everything on his own, from system to structure, history to heritage. There was a plutocrat, a stag quantum of a plutocrat. But he gave the plutocrat a meaning, he showed that the plutocrat is only as smart as the fritterer, as useful as the wisdom of the fritterer. It’s not hyperbolic to say that he's to Manchester City and the league what Sir Alex Ferguson was to neighbours Manchester United for the large part of the Premier League period. maybe indeed more influential, in that United had enjoyed spells of domination in the history too, less so City.
still, Guardiola’s was a palm of ideas, If Ferguson’s was a triumph of tactics and drive. There's no deeper thinker of the game than Guardiola in the ultramodern game, a political perfectionist, his actuality not fueled by titles or plutocrat, but by the hunt to understand the game, a spiritual trip, a passage to find the soul of the game. He himself formerly put it philosophically “ I've been in the game 35 times. But if you ask me how important I know about the game, I would say nothing, perhaps just a bit. ” He frequently tone-effaces. He credits his playing days' glory to Cruyff. “ Without him, I would have been playing in the third division. ” He'd reproduce the same lines latterly “ If it wasn’t for Messi, I’d be guiding in the third division. ” In City, too, he has shirked down from himself and dwelled on the players. He's infrequently dazed by the air, rather eyeless to the air. He doesn't glow, indeed fleetingly, in tone- glory. He's a dogmatist, but not a puritan, a romantic, yet a pragmatist. At the heart of the game is the ball, and like any other trainer he wants control and is fearful of the opponents. It's just that his way of achieving control is different that's by guarding the ball further than the opponent. Death by thousand passes. Death by rigorous pressing. He himself had laid out that gospel “ We play in the other platoon’s half as much as possible because I get upset when the ball is in my half. We’re a horrible platoon without the ball so I want us to get it back as soon as possible and I’d rather give down fouls and the ball in their half than ours. ”
But he's not pontifical, He's sensitive to the ever-changing demands of the game. He realises that what's good now might not be in the coming game. So he tinkers and revises, shuffles men and systems. It’s a total- football mongrel, but not in the sense that every player can play every part, but every player can acclimatize to every part and system. Indeed at the tiki-taka florescence, he grasped that the system would soon come outdated and that the approach needs to be altered. He was the messiah of False Nine, but latterly he'd resort to classical No 9s and win titles with them. Like Robert Lewandowski, Sergio Aguero and Erling Haaland. False 9’s bill boy was Messi, but he'd deputize him in a more withdrawn part too. He was an exponent of reversed full- tails, also at City, he'd make the full-reverse join the midfield so that there's a redundant guard. It’s at times, a back three-and-a-half.
This time, especially after Joao Cancelo, a full- reverse with play-making vision( a Fale 2 as he was jokingly called), was lent out to Bayern Munich following an alleged disagreement with Guardiola, he repurposed John Stone as a play-making protector. Against Inter Milan, he was a commodity of a reversed full-reverse at times and had further traces in the Inter box than numerous of their bushwhackers. A centre-reverse who could be a playmaker, as well as a full-reverse, is the description of total football.
This slyness embodies the genius of Guardiola, the football brain that keeps on ticking and picking the tiniest, bitsy complaint. He wants every note in place. His former director Louis Van Gaal had detected this particularity during his playing days. “ He noway conforms, he doesn’t relax, he always wants to change effects, to learn effects, ” he'd said. It’s applicable to reproduce a quotation from his close friend David Trueba in Marti Perarnau’s book, Pep Guardiola The Elaboration. “ When it comes to analysing or judging Guardiola, you must bear in mind that underneath the elegant suit, the cashmere muumuu and the tie is the son of a bricklayer. Inside those precious Italian shoes there's a heart in espadrilles, ” he says.
Guardiola, according to Perarnau, is driven by an inner feeling that he's not good enough, so works doubly as hard to make up for his perceived scarcities. That could be at the core of his unsparing perfectionism indeed on minor effects similar to the length of the lawn. Upon his appearance at Etihad in 2016, he went to the groundsmen and detailed the exact specifications for how they should cut the lawn on the fields at the Etihad Stadium and the club’s training installation. Should be no longer than 19 mm, he claimed.
important of the system was in place indeed before he reached Etihad. The club had a robust youth system, the sharpest scouts around, cutting-edge technology in data scraping and booby-trapping and loads of plutocrats to buy the players the director wanted. One thing it didn’t have was identity. He incontinently set about establishing that, as he has in every other club. He encouraged the players to take to the field together before games, to leave as one latterly, and to celebrate the pretensions together. He inseminated in them a sense of pride that comes from not just playing for Manchester City, but that they come from Manchester. “ Manchester is a megacity that knows how to fall down and get back over again. That's the club’s identity too, ” he used to tell his players.
The success of this club would be his biggest heritage. The treble was an assertion that we're living not just in the period of a grand Manchester City platoon, but in the times of a grander trainer too who breathed soul and life into petrodollars.
TAGS: Champions League, Champions League Final, Champions League Football, English Football, Man City, Manchester City, Pep Guardiola, UEFA Champions League
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