Guardiola builds from the back
IT started silently, with a yellow bib. When Javi Martinez reported to Bayern Munich in the summer of 2013, his new coach, Pep Guardiola, made it immediately clear that things would be different. ‘‘He told me he thought I could play as a defensive midfielder,’’ recalled the Spain international. ‘‘But he also said I would make a good central defender.’’
The bib confirmed it. In Pep Confidential, his fascinating depiction of the Catalan’s first season in Munich, Marti Perarnau recounts the pre-season session in which Guardiola separated his squad into defensive and attacking players according to the colour of their training tops. Martinez’s was yellow. He was, from that point on, more defender than midfielder.
The transformation Martinez experienced has, in Guardiola’s time at Barcelona and Bayern, become not far off his signature move as a coach. At the Nou Camp, he took Javier Mascherano, who had spent his entire career as a snapping, snarling midfield enforcer, and turned him into ‘‘the best central defender we have’’.
At the Allianz Arena in Munich, he repeated the trick with his countryman, and now he has raised the possibility that he will do it again at Manchester City. Guardiola’s new club remain hopeful of concluding a deal, likely to be worth about £50 million, for John Stones, precisely the sort of ballplaying defender that Guardiola cherishes. But he may also seek to find a place for Fernandinho, usually a box-to-box midfielder at the Etihad Stadium, in his backline.
The Brazilian, in that case, would do well to examine Perarnau’s account of how Guardiola taught Martinez to play in his new position. It makes for uncomfortable reading: three training sessions, over a day and a half, described variously as ‘‘an ordeal’’, ‘‘hellish’’ and ‘‘a psychological barrier’’ for the Spaniard.
‘‘In almost every move, Javi ends up where he shouldn’t be,’’ writes Perarnau. ‘‘He starts a run when he shouldn’t, he distances himself from Dante [his defensive partner] when he should be playing close to him. It is a hellish afternoon for him, and he is constantly being corrected.’’ Guardiola barks orders at him in Spanish – ‘‘Jump, Javi! Look at Dante! Run!’’
He walks him through every single channel he expects his defenders to close off. They repeat exercises again and again, Guardiola ‘‘trusting in his squad’s infinite patience’’ as he tries to ‘‘reset Martinez’s mental button’’, to teach him to think as a defender.
Given that Martinez – who had been played at central defender while working with Marcelo Bielsa at Athletic Bilbao – had some experience in the role, Fernandinho’s education is likely to be even more exacting.
Guardiola will do it because it is crucial to the way he wishes to play, so intensive in possession, that his defenders are capable not simply of destroying play, but building it, too.
In some cases – Stones and Gerard Pique, for example – career defenders are well-suited to that role. In others, he feels it is more effective to finetune a midfielder’s positional sense than to spend time working on a centre back’s technique.
The night before Everton agreed to pay Barnsley £3 million for an 18-year-old Stones in January 2013, David Moyes called David Flitcroft, his counterpart at the Championship club. The Scot wanted to ask the manager who had nurtured the teenager if he believed that his protege could cut it among the elite. Flitcroft simply told him he was ‘‘buying money’’.
Indeed, it is a measure of just how valuable the ‘‘humble, grounded’’ player Flitcroft knew is now that Barnsley, thanks to a 15 per cent sell-on clause inserted into his contract, can expect to receive a windfall of pounds £7.5 million if and when Stones completes his £50 million move.
‘‘There is a big emphasis on defenders being able to build from the back,’’ Gary Pallister, once Britain’s most expensive defender, says. ‘‘Managers want players who are comfortable on the ball, capable of driving into spaces. That is why Stones stands out.’’
‘Managers want players who are comfortable on the ball.’
TIMES