THERE WAS A fascinating coaching insight into Pep Guardiola on Tuesday.
It came from Pako Ayestaran, an assistant to Rafael Benitez at five different clubs (including Valencia and Liverpool) and who spent a short-lived and rather miserable stint in charge at the Mestella in the wake of Gary Neville’s sacking.
Ayestaran is an astute football man, steeped in the Spanish game. Breaking down Guardiola’s ways, he used an anecdote about Javier Mascherano to illustrate the point.
The Argentine, he says, was the most intelligent player in the Liverpool squad he and Benitez oversaw. He had the in-game awareness to remain so positionally sound that it repeatedly astounded his team-mates and the coaching staff.
But when he moved to Barcelona in 2010 and was coached by Guardiola, he would tell Ayestaran about how he was learning all over again. Guardiola, he said, was teaching him how the game could be played in a different way.
It gives an idea of what the current, maligned Manchester City coach offers in charge of a team. Even for experienced, intelligent players, Guardiola changes their perception.
He will be criticised heavily for City’s elimination at such an early juncture of Europe’s elite tournament. After all, he was brought to England to dominate and radicalise. But England is an unforgiving environment.
It’s a place that enjoys being told of how it produces the best brand of football. The most thrilling. The most popular.
But, it’s a dysfunctional arena. It revolves around explosive storylines. No one has the patience for subtleties. It’s a place that rewards the loud and brash. More than that, it gives them a pulpit to preach from.
For a long time, Jurgen Klopp has seemed tailor-made for the Premier League. The fist-pumping, the sideline-jumping, the adrenaline-feeding frenzy he whips together. Everyone wanted him. But, even the top-flight is now growing weary of his patchy Liverpool performance. In his first season, he brought the club to two finals – one of them being a first European decider in nine years. But that’s irrelevant. A minor detail to the majority. The impatience is increasing – even for the proponent of ‘heavy metal’ football. In true Nigel Tufnell style, Premier League aficionados want it to go to eleven.
So, is there any hope for Guardiola? After all, he’s a Coldplay fan.
In the rush and push of the English game, will he be allowed the time and patience to engineer what he wants at Manchester City? No plan interrupted is ever successful. But that logic is usually lost on team owners.
Guardiola has had little time to put his stamp on the team. The first thing any coach does is scout his own squad – figure out what he has and what he needs. Considering player recruitment can take between a year and eighteen months for specific targets, he’ll be doing well to bring in exactly what he desires this summer.
Yet, the onus is on him to make magic happen instantly or after just one transfer window. When the magic doesn’t happen, there’s a queue of people waiting to point a finger and tell him he’s past his sell-by date. Or point to Manuel Pellegrini and say, without any kind of irony, ‘He reached the semi-finals in Europe last year and Guardiola can’t even get past Monaco’.
In many ways, that’s the culture of the Premier League. It’s its own worst enemy. It has cherished the likes of Guardiola for so long but has no tolerance or wider understanding when he’s finally immersed in it and attempting to transition.
Of course, there have been mis-steps. But that’s part of any new job.
There was another excellent assessment made by Ayestaran on Tuesday:
I think this team is still in that learning process. It’s such a different way of approaching games than what they did before that you cannot expect a seamless progression. They just haven’t grown up developing in this style.It was different at Bayern because he had more talented players than the ones at City. It’s especially different in the middle. He still doesn’t have the players to offer him that timing on the ball he needs”.
The message is clear: it needs work. Just like Chelsea did before Antonio Conte arrived. And just like Manchester United did before Jose Mourinho arrived. But neither has experienced the ferocity Guardiola has. Perhaps when expectations are high, the vitriol is even higher.
Having revolutionised the game over the last decade, it would fit the narrative that Guardiola’s ingenuity and expertise would count for so little in the bizarre, dysfunctional world of English football.
