WHEN ACTOR-MANAGED PEP LEFT THE STAGE, HIS SHOW CLOSED

It’s FAIR to say that European Cup-winning managers within these shores have not always felt the need to be demonstrative on the touchline.

Liverpool’s Bob Paisley, who won the trophy three times in five years, sat in the main stand for much of a game and would head down the interior staircase at Anfield to suggest a substitution. Yet in keeping with his collectivist culture, if there was a shift in the pattern of the game before the player got on, assistant Joe Fagan would leave things exactly as they were. ‘I’m not letting you go on and be associated with this s***. Go and sit down,’ Fagan told defender tommy smith after Paisley had indicated he should be sent into one particularly torrid game at Queens Park Rangers in 1975.

tuesday night’s events at the Etihad stadium revealed that that kind of touchline management is ancient history: dead and gone. Pep Guardiola’s dismissal to the stands after half- time against Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool left a vast emptiness at the heart of Manchester City — amplifying, through the 47-year-old’s absence, what his extraordinary, if sometimes unfathomable, touchline presence brings to the modern football stage.

Guardiola’s departure was, to cite a description on these pages yesterday, the removal of an orchestral conductor: akin to the Premier League champions-elect being reduced to 10 men.

An intricate little second-half drama subsequently played out up in the leather seats where Guardiola, marooned next to his great confidant Manel Estiarte and forbidden under Article 69 of UEFA’s disciplinary rules to communicate ‘ directly or indirectly’ with his players or technical staff, seemed to shout back to a member of City staff, at the entrance to the stand. Whatever that individual communicated down to Domenec torrent, the manager’s assistant, had the most minimal impact imaginable, as City crumbled and Liverpool cruised to the semi-finals. It takes a brave and foolish individual to attempt to imitate those whirling eddies of Guardiola touchline creative energy. (Pep-watchers say scratching the head means he’s worried about something, rubbing the face means he can’t find the right word, and animated pointing could mean almost anything.)

Yet torrent’s ventures into the technical area were little more than a trickle in that second half, while Mikel Arteta, the most recognisable member of the coaching team, was rooted desperately to his seat. A rabbit in the headlamps. No-one seemed remotely capable of occupying the vast, Pep-sized hole.

Liverpool would have been no less marooned, in the same circumstances. Klopp is another supreme example of the new managerial choreography in which every move is monitored and hyper-analysed. there’s a reason why Raphael Honigstein’s excellent new biography of him is called Bring the Noise. On this night, though, the German revealed an appreciation of light and shade. An air of calm was the requirement and he brought that. It was grace under pressure from Liverpool’s manager, you had to say.

Paisley would have told his successor something about the value of that. ‘If you want to tell anybody anything, speak softly,’ the Wearsider once observed. ‘You’ll find they’re trying to listen to you.’ Yet even as he said it, the cult of the alpha- male manager was beginning to take hold. We were already well beyond the dawn of a new managerial age when Paisley retired at 64, in 1983.

Brian Clough was at the vanguard, it’s almost needless to say. It was he who saw to it that managerial arguments started becoming part of football entertainment. Clough metaphorically thumped Don Revie in a Yorkshire tV studio, after his Leeds United predecessor illadvisedly agreed to be interviewed alongside him, in what became a piece of classic television, in 1974.

But though Clough brought noise and braggadocio, those who played for him insist he did not attempt to bring theatre to the touchline and dugout, in the way that Guardiola does now. In the heat of battle, his green sweatshirt was about as bright as it got.

‘He’d need to be pretty irate to be out of his seat,’ Clough’s Nottingham Forest European Cup- winning midfielder Ian Bowyer tells Sportsmail. ‘there was one occasion when Kenny Burns had played a square pass he thought was dangerous, which prompted Brian to leave the dugout and dictate a letter to his secretary, fining Kenny, which Brian handed to him at half-time.

‘But he was quite controlled in the dug- out. I remember sitting with him in there once when I was injured and him saying, “Hang on, I need to think about this”. He was always trying to work out how to make it better on the pitch. surprising though it might sound, for him that meant stopping to think. At half-time he’d say, “Compose yourselves and listen for a minute”. He actually thought the half-time interval was too long.’

Clough famously didn’t enter the playing area to motivate his players before extra time in the 1991 FA Cup final against tottenham Hotspur, which they lost, though perhaps that was his counterintuitive way of contributing to the theatre. He certainly did look to damage opposition managers’ capacity to operate in what, from 1991, became known as technical areas. When Ron Atkinson arrived at Forest’s City Ground as West Bromwich Albion manager in 1978, he found that Clough’s dug- out was near the halfway line, while his own was a continental- style shelter positioned halfway towards the goal. Atkinson says he pointed out to Clough’s assistant, Peter taylor, that the structure was hopelessly positioned for the away team’s perspective. ‘Yes it is, isn’t it?’ taylor replied flatly.

Malcolm Allison, with fedora and cigar, at Crystal Palace in the 1970s, was another of the new breed. He, like Clough, did studio punditry. tommy Docherty and terry Venables were both personalities, too, though none of that quartet was really a touchline type. Venables liked to watch from a special box in the stands at Crystal Palace.

Atkinson also brought razzledazzle, though he rationed his theatrics down at pitch level. It was his Manchester United successor, sir Alex Ferguson, who did far more to take the managerial persona on to another level. Ferguson turned scrutinising a watch face into an art form, of course. And then there were the

feuds — feuds like no other, with those whom he considered a threat. Fuelled and lapped up by saturation TV coverage, it was Ferguson’s pitched battles with Arsene Wenger, and later Rafael Benitez, which turned the focus away from the field. DURING a game, you generally only saw Ferguson up on his feet when there was trouble afoot. And you certainly took a risk by standing in his way in those moments. Ferguson’s assistant Mike Phelan blocked his path from dug-out to touchline as united trailed Real Madrid in the last 20 minutes of the Scot’s last Champions League match at the club’s helm, in March 2013. Phelan was barrelled out of the way as Ferguson, desperate to sample European success one more time, bolted towards the playing area.

Ryan Giggs tells a story of the lengths team-mates always went to, to pretend they could not hear what Ferguson was bellowing at them. This entailed standing 20 yards away from the touchline whenever possible.

He wasn’t the only indifferent player. Former Premier League title-winner Chris Sutton admits he wasn’t the remotest bit interested when the demonstrative Martin O’Neill was in full flow on the Celtic touchline, where the forward played for six years.

‘No!’ says Sutton, one of Sportsmail’s

analysts, to the question of whether he took O’Neill’s instructions on board. ‘That may have been wrong, but there’s also something wrong if you need a manager, jumping up and down in the technical area to motivate you.’ Kenny Dalglish, Sutton’s manager when Blackburn Rovers won the title, said very little, the 45-yearold said.

One senior Manchester City player has indicated that Guardiola and his gestures from the side of the pitch are unfathomable. ‘I can’t hear him and I can’t understand them,’ he said, a few months back.

That might explain why the Catalan so often needs to usher players to the touchline and issue them with instructions. John Stones has often been the messenger. But the practical, footballing benefits of making a noise are just a component part of what the 21st-century actor-manager brings. Premier League clubs pay the biggest salaries for the world’s best managers, who are expected to occupy front and centre stage — exuding authority, power and panache in a world where convincing supporters is almost as much a requirement as motivating players. Guardiola’s dress sense has become virtually a City dress code. Not only does he arrive wearing his favourite Dsquared2 suits and casual wear but other City executives wear the same brand at matches, too. Guardiola is a stickler for such uniformity. And while Sam Allardyce might suggest that English managers are less appreciated than the continentals — ‘If only my name was Allardici,’ as he once said — you only have to see him at close quarters on match days, with those immaculate tailored suits and shoes so polished you can see your face in them — to see that he is making a statement, too. When Allardyce arrived at West Ham, he said that he’d start watching from the stands, as he had at Bolton, when he’d got the team right. Yet he never gravitated from the dug-out. The world had moved on from the days of him fiddling with earpieces at the Reebok. All this football world’s a stage now. We had Andre Villas-Boas’s apparent certainty that he could analyse his players better while down on his haunches. We have Rafa Benitez’s mysterious hand signals. And — perhaps the ultimate act of football artifice — we have Jose Mourinho’s acts of cool insouciance.

‘The role of the manager continues to change with the evolution of the modern game,’ League Managers’ Association chief executive Richard Bevan tells Sportsmail. ‘Leading, coaching, talent acquisition and development, public relations and man-management —they’re all still as important. But the modern manager is faced with different challenges.’ IN HIS study of the current Manchester City manager’s methods, Pep Guardiola: The

Evolution, the writer Marti Perarnau says the histrionics are about more than image. ‘ Pep “plays” the match from the touchline,’ Perarnau writes. ‘ He still feels like a player and takes part in every move. That’s why he moves constantly, waving his arms about and shouting. Just like he did when he was a player.’

But it’s all a world away from the days of Paisley. A little over 40 years ago, Graeme Souness arrived at Anfield from Middlesbrough and asked how he should approach playing for the team. Paisley did not feel the need to dignify this with a reply. Fagan was deputed to have a quiet word a few days later.

‘ Son,’ he said. ‘ You play in midfield. And we’ve paid all that money for you. So don’t ask us how to play.’