Time would freeze the image. The great Catalan general stooped on his knees in the corner of his technical area in Etihad with the eyes of a fallen man. His troops are tired and scattered, his fans scarred. In the centre of the pitch Real Madrid are celebrating. It’s a cruel irony that Guardiola’s fall has come at the hands of once his bitterest rivals; the lone respite was the stage was Etihad and not Bernabeu. He has somewhere to hide. Yet, he didn’t hide. He forced a smile, one that’s more enigmatic than manufactured. an indecipherable smile. It could be one of pain or pang, of rage or resignation, of hurt or humiliation. He had suffered defeats. Some he has taken with angst, some with disbelief. “I don’t like to lose, but you can’t always win. I don’t have such delusions,” he had said after the Inter Milan ambush of Barcelona. Last year, he said: “I’m delighted to have failed. I love failures. In this society where everything has to be perfect.” After the defeat to Real Madrid in the first leg, he was painstakingly articulate. “It’s not the first time I played in that competition, the Champions League, 17 years playing in that competition, and every time I lose, boom, my God!” he said. He then used his fingers to mimic firing bullets. “Pew, pew, pew. A lot. Is it new? No, it’s OK.” But there has been something deeper and intriguing about the recent defeats (and draws). Not the victory margins, or his desire or his tactical flexibility, or the team’s wastefulness, but the absence of authority his teams have wielded. The best Guardiola teams were infallible, a fabric without stain, sides that crushed opponents, tactically, and technically. Teams lost the game before they made their first step on the field. Even his imperfect teams triumphed, because they brandished authority and control of destiny. When they started stringing together victories, the competitors froze, because they knew the inevitability of Guardiola’s storming over them. Two wonderful managers of the era, Jurgen Klopp and Mikel Arteta, would confess how Guardiola had equally infuriated and motivated them, how he made them better managers in the process of competing with them. Not this season, though. The league race is far from over. There could be late twists. and Arsenal are not impregnable by any stretch of imagination. He can still wrestle the League, FA Cup and League Cup. But City, despite second on the table, looks fragile and frazzled, as though the light has left them. Guardiola himself has looked puzzled, racking his head in search of answers to the riddles that had befuddled him. Erling Haaland’s rustiness has distorted them, but his midfield has been strangely bereft of imagination. This would hurt him, because he fetishes midfields, and because he seems them as his most important blocks. His ideas have failed to find a conduit. Apart from Bernardo Silva, none are the archetypal Guardiola midfielders. He sensed the game’s drifting winds, the directness it would re-embrace, but in the endeavour to create something new, did he lose his identity? The soul of Guardiola? Similar questions would lurk: Is he tactically stagnated? Has this century’s deepest football thinker, the man who set the ideals and benchmarks, who moulded and remoulded the game, trapped himself in a tactical labyrinth? Has he overthought himself to a state of inescapable confusion? Has he burned out? Does he need a change of setting? Is he tired of success? Or the naysayers would begin to sharpen the knives, and question whether he needs the best of players to raise his empire. He had Lionel Messi and a fleet of midfield virtuosos to build the Barcelona dynasty; his Bayern Munich possessed Arjen Robben, Frank Ribery, Thomas Muller and Robert Lewandowski; Manchester City had a golden lineage of midfield inventors, from David Silva to Kevin de Bruyne. Every season, he had a talisman and a platoon of fine generals. Two seasons he didn’t, and two seasons his City withered. So does Guardiola really need a figurehead to fire his team to glory? Then, which team doesn’t? Every successful team has a first among the equals, the man with the halo.Story continues below this ad But the defeats of Guardiola will be celebrated as much as his successes. Perhaps with more glee. Some kind of schadenfreude, he knows. “Ah, what are they waiting for me? You finish twelfth or thirteenth… Yes, yes, definitely. And I’m delighted to welcome them (laughs). Delighted. That gives you energy,” he told GQ last year. Everybody loves a Pep failure. Perhaps he himself too. But the image— Of the great Catalan general stooped on his knees in the corner of his technical area in the Etihad with the eyes of a fallen man—could be more symbolic. And this defeat, more than the rest, would really pain him.
Is Real Madrid defeat the beginning of end for Pep Guardiola at Manchester City
