CHAMPIONS LEAGUE – Brilliant coach, Pep Guardiola struggles with Manchester City, especially in the European Cup where the Citizens have to face OL this Saturday. It is because the Spanish training prefers to dogmatize the football of its team rather than to embrace the chaos that can sometimes reign within a match.
To an admirer who asked him: “maestro, where does your inspiration come from?“, the composer Arnold Schönberg replied with the following parable:
“An ant crossing the path of a centipede asked him this question:
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– How do you, centipede, to move all these legs one after the other and move forward? I, who only have six, do not understand how you manage to walk. The centipede paused to think. And the more he thought, the less he understood how he managed to synchronize all these appendages. “It’s true, how do I do it?“And when the ant walked away without having received a response and he wanted to resume his way too, he was unable to do so. He did not know which paw to move first. He could no longer walk.”
“That’s why I never ask myself the question of the origin of inspiration“, concludes the father of serial music.
This is why too much thinking can sometimes hurt, no matter what field that thought translates into action, and why switching from twelve-tone to football isn’t that absurd – when it comes to Pep Guardiola, a coach who thinks more about the game than any of his peers … except, perhaps, his assistant Juanma Lillo.
Guardiola is not Klopp
We will not go so far as to say that his Manchester City, the most successful team in England, is sometimes the victim of attacks of amnesia and comes to forget to play; but it happens – rarely, we agree, but it happens – to no longer really know in which direction to move, to get entangled in a system, to come up against a wall that his manager has, of a certain way helped to erect himself by his choices.
Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola
Credit: Getty Images
This perhaps explains why Pep, despite his share of genius, never acquired the reputation of being a coaching in real time, when it comes to stepping into the heat of the moment, accepting and even embracing what is chaotic in football, as Klopp knows so well. It is possible to think too much and become the centipede of the fable.
We were surprised at the number of defeats conceded by the Citizens in the Premier League during the season which has just ended: nine. One should be even more surprised at City’s inability to turn the tide of a game when they were down. Of the thirteen league games in which they did, Guardiola’s side won only three, while Liverpool, led ten times, ended up winning six times. The gift of reactivity of the Reds is one of the reasons why they made the hole on the champion of which they ended up taking away the title; and in fact, if we establish a classification of the teams who knew how to take the most points from losing positions, Manchester City only points to eleventh place.
City don’t know how to turn things around
But, you will say, this 2019-20 season must be an exception. Think again. It was the same in 2018-19. This time, City, yet champion – and what a champion, with a hat-trick – was in eighteenth (!) Place in this ranking, having won only one of the six matches in which they accused a delay at the notice board. Liverpool, meanwhile, had ultimately won five of the seven matches they were on their way to losing. When City dominate, City wins. When City struggles … well, City really struggles, and nowhere more than in Europe. Let Lyon remember it.
This Europe where the record of Guardiola with Man City, he who was twice titled with Messi and Barcelona, is mediocre in view of the gigantic investments made by the Abu Dhabi United Group of Sheikh Mansour. This Champions League in which Man City, after losing a semi-final against Real, future winner, when Manuel Pellegrini was the Mancunian coach (in 2015-16, 0-1 on the two matches), found the way to be eliminated by Monaco (in eighth), Liverpool and Tottenham (in quarters) since the Catalan replaced the Chilean. Why, and how then, if we intend to go beyond the only “facts of the game”, including the invalidation of the “goal” of the qualification at the end of the quarter-final return against Tottenham?
Manchester City – Tottenham
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If the Guardiolian game was not, for example, because of what it has thought about, mastered, almost dogmatic and what it owes to the repetitions of sequences in training, not its own enemy when the context in which one he had to express himself had something irrational, as is almost always the case in major European shocks? What if Guardiola went too far in his desire to surprise? Too “imaginative” choice will pay much more in a knockout competition than in a championship where the match to follow always offers a possibility of redemption.
Does the genius think too much?
It was April 9, 2019. I will always remember my reaction and that of my colleagues around me in the new White Hart Lanewhen we received the scoresheet for the quarter-final first leg of which City were largely starting out, and logically favorites. . Delph left back, Kompany on the bench … why not Laporte on the left, and Kompany plus Otamendi in central defense? And what about De Bruyne as a replacement, really? We know the rest.
Tottenham, who nevertheless had all the penalties in the world in the Premier League (where they had taken four points out of twenty-four), won 1-0 against the future champion, who had dominated possession of the ball, as usual , but had framed only two shots in 90 minutes, against four for the Spurs of Pochettino, who found themselves in favorable waivers for an unexpected qualification in half. It wasn’t a detail: the goal had come when Son took advantage of a Delphi float – who else? – to escape behind the defense of the Citizens; and at the final whistle, it was hard not to think that, this time, the most important choice of their manager had weakened her team and prevented them from expressing themselves with their usual vista. Yes, it is possible to think too much, even when you are a genius.
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