Guardiola rekindles ‘father-son’ Mexican alliance with Lillo in bid to reboot City regime
MARCO MENDOZA considers the question and politely disagrees. For him, Juanma Lillo’s appointment as Pep Guardiola’s assistant manager this week marks not so much a reunion between football obsessives as the continuation of a long-standing relationship that never lapsed.
“It’s not that I always believed Juanma and Pep would work together again, it’s more that I believe they have never really stopped working with each other,” Mendoza says. “They talked a lot about football and shared many things without having to belong to the same institution. I’ve always thought of them as like a father and son.”
The palatial, 80-acre training base that Manchester City call home is a far cry from the dusty local water park in one of Mexico’s drug-smuggling heartlands where, 14 years ago, Guardiola pitched up on the last stop of a glittering playing career that had yielded six Spanish titles and the European Cup with Barcelona.
But Guardiola did not arrive at Dorados de Sinaloa, a modest team at the wrong end of Mexico’s first division, Liga MX, and more recently a managerial pit stop for Diego Maradona, in expectation of one lucrative final payday. As he prepared to make the transition from player to coach, the Catalan was there to pick the brains of a man he would come to regard as one of the most influential voices in his career, and the one to which he has now turned to fill the No 2 role vacated by Mikel Arteta.
For Mendoza, an impressionable young midfielder at that time, the chance to learn from Lillo and Guardiola was a rare one.
“I just lived and interpreted football differently after working with Pep and Juanma,” he says.
Yet those five months in north-west Mexico in 2006 were no less valuable an experience for Guardiola. Culiacan may be best known as the stamping ground of the infamous Sinaloa cartel, then led by the notorious drug kingpin, Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman. But it also became the place where Guardiola, under the watch of the much-travelled Lillo, refined many of the ideas formulated in Barcelona.
Raul Caneda, then Lillo’s assistant at Dorados, believes it was in Mexico that Guardiola honed his understanding of the possession-based play espoused by his mentor, Johan Cruyff, at Barcelona, a view echoed by Mendoza.
“Pep learnt from Juanma and Raul the importance of defending from the front, of always playing together on offence and defence, that the two are not separate entities,” Mendoza says.
“Of moving and disorganising your opponent to find that ideal moment to pass or break the lines. You don’t forget Juanma’s words and his infinite concepts.”
Lillo first encountered the future City manager in 1996 when, after his Real Oviedo team were beaten 4-2 by Barcelona, a 25-year-old Guardiola knocked on his dressing-room door and introduced himself with a pitch Lillo found endearing: “I love your teams, I’ve heard great things about you, can we be friends?”
A decade later, Guardiola was more curious than ever, and eager to exhaust Lillo for information. Another team-mate from Dorados at the time,
Angel Morales, felt Guardiola was a player only in name by that stage.
“He was already starting his career as a coach,” Morales said.
Perhaps the injuries that restricted Guardiola to just 10 appearances that season played their part, but he would spend hours after training talking tactics and systems and exchanging ideas with Lillo, who is credited with inventing the 4-2-3-1 formation and, despite the father-son dynamic, is only five years Guardiola’s senior.
The water park where Dorados trained had only a palm-roofed gazebo for a changing room and no showers, but such shortcomings did not extend to the training sessions.
“In Mexico, we had been used to training for a long time, but with little intensity,” Mendoza says. “With Juanma, and Pep, that changed. Workouts were short, but they were intense and high quality.”
Lillo is a prodigious reader. He is said to have a library boasting 10,000 volumes and a complete collection of the world’s leading football magazines and newspapers. It was a passion shared by Guardiola.
He would seldom be seen in La Cocinita del Medio or Cafe Miro, two of his favourite eateries in the city, without a book or magazine, which he would devour as readily as the stuffed peppers or enchiladas he was fond of.
Neither Lillo nor Guardiola could prevent Dorados from being relegated, but Lillo had made a lasting impression on the younger man. When Guardiola was placed in charge of Barcelona ‘B’ 12 months later, he initially asked Lillo to help him prepare the training sessions.
Guardiola would never look back. Within two years, he had guided Barcelona’s first team to a historic treble of La Liga, Copa del Rey and Champions League. The apprentice had become the master, but Guardiola’s desire to tap into Lillo’s well of knowledge has remained undiluted. City have, at once, a new and old alliance. (© Daily Telegraph, London)