PLAYING FOR PEP IS EXHAUSTING!
Bernardo Silva catches his breath to tell all about life in Guardiola’s relentless regime
BERNARDO Silva does not think last season’s title race was the most challenging of his young career. No, 2016-17, when little Monaco held off the challenge of Paris Saint-Germain to win the French league was the hardest earned.
Monaco won 30 games out of 38 that year, including every one of their last 12. Last season, Manchester City won their last 14 Premier League matches to hold off Liverpool.
‘Both were incredible efforts,’ Bernardo o smiled. ‘But in France e nobody expected we could do it. Maybe what happened that year prepared me for last season.’
But what of this season? With Liverpool already five points ahead of City, just how good will Pep Guardola’s team need to be if they are to record a third consecutive title? ‘For us it’s simple,’ Bernardo tells
Sportsmail. ‘We have to set new targets and new records to keep going. The maximum number of Premier League titles is three in a row. We want to try and reach that level of the best teams ever to play in this country.
‘If you want to do that, you have to win constantly. That’s the main target now. Not to be a normal team but a team that constantly dominates English football; a special team.’
Bernardo, just turned 25, is still a relatively young footballer but by the time his new City contract expires in 2025 he will not be. It feels as though this is his time. At City, the guard is slowly changing.
Last season was Vincent Kompany’s last and this one is David Silva’s. Next through the exit will be Sergio Aguero so the new City will be constructed around the talents of Raheem Sterling, Kevin De Bruyne and their player of the season, Bernardo.
If the bright-eyed Portuguese feels the weight of that responsibility, he doesn’t show it. When boyhood club Benfica spat him out after just one league appearance in 2014 it broke his heart but he told himself he would prove them wrong.
Now Bernardo is ready to make City his ‘new Benfica’, a place where he can build something a little more permanent than many of the other foreign players who pass through the English game.
‘l have signed a contract that goes until 2025 and, if I didn’t want to stay here for a long time, I wouldn’t have signed it,’ he said.
‘To know that if you stay you are going to fight for all the titles over the next 10 years gives you the willingness and ambition to stay; to try to do your best to be important at the club. I think that’s why Sergio and David have stayed so long. I think we are now arriving at the stage where we can fight for European trophies as well.’
David Silva has announced his intention to end his 10- year residency at the Etihad Stadium next May but you could argue that the shift towards his younger teammate began last season when Bernardo made the six- man shortlist for the PFA Player of the Year.
‘Look, they are very big shoes to fill,’ he said.
‘David and I sometimes play in the same position and have the same style but I think it’s unfair on David to be compared to me because he has played at a huge level for 15 years and I am just starting.
‘The team will go on. Yaya left, Vinny last season, Kun [Aguero] one day will go.
‘Players will try to replace them, knowing that it’s difficult because they are some of the best players to ever play at this club. But one day if they want me to try to fill David’s shoes, I will try my best to do it.’ THE day Bernardo sits down to talk has already been a long one. City trained in the afternoon and it’s gone 6pm when he emerges from the dressing room to keep our appointment.
Life under Guardiola is unrelentingly demanding. The two men first met when Guardiola sought Bernardo out in the players’ tunnel after his Monaco team lost a pulsating Champions League game at the Etihad in February 2017. We don’t have to be that clever to work out what was said. Bernardo was impressed by City that night: by the stadium, the atmosphere and the supporters. Monaco were to prevail in the second leg — knocking City out — but the night had left an impression. That summer he signed for £43million, committing himself to life on the Guardiola hamster wheel.
‘Yeah, it’s exhausting under Pep, there is no doubt about that,’ he said with a smile. ‘ But it’s what we have to do. If you want to go for all the trophies season after season you need to have someone who pushes you day after day.
‘ Sometimes it’s not easy but it’s good to have someone who won’t let you slacken off.’
On the day he signed, Bernardo arrived at Manchester airport in pink beach shorts. He had come from holiday in Ibiza and presumed the July weather would be similar in Manchester. He was wrong.
A little more than two years on, he understands his new home better. Eschewing the Cheshire enclaves favoured by most Manchester footballers, Bernardo lives in a city-centre apartment.
‘I am not a country boy,’ he told the BBC last month. ‘I am a city boy from Lisbon.’
Manchester does not have Lisbon’s weather but it does have a burgeoning social scene. Bernardo likes to eat at Juan Mata’s Spanish restaurant on Deansgate and very occasionally at the one owned by his manager just around the corner.
‘There is no discount for players,’ he laughed. ‘The main thing is that the people from the north are very kind. The way they welcomed me here in Manchester was fantastic.
‘People recognise you on the streets but they are respectful. In Portugal they are more touchy and sometimes it’s a bit much.
‘Lisbon is a great city and I miss it but it has been really good for me to live in Manchester and try the different food and things. One day it may be time for another thing but not now.’
Throwing himself into Manchester life has come easily to Bernardo but it has a purpose too.
He has no interest in thinking about football when he is not at work. So nights at home are spent watching TV series such as Peaky
Blinders — set in Birmingham but filmed under Manchester’s grey skies — and Game of Thrones. When the phone rings, he won’t always answer it — even if it’s his grandmother on the line.
‘We spend so much time here at the training ground and when we play away it is trains, planes, travel, hotels,’ he explained.
‘So when I am home, I try to switch off. Yeah, my grandmother used to call after a bad game. Now I don’t answer the phone. Honestly.
‘Everyone loves football so much that even people who don’t understand a thing about it try to give their opinion. But now they know I don’t want talk about it. I want to discuss normal things.
‘I know everyone watches football on TV and lives it with passion but it’s my job and if I spent five hours here plus the time I have with my friends talking about football then that is the only thing I would have in my life. I would go crazy.’ AT THE age of seven, Bernardo was handed a chance to join Benfica’s academy. His grandfather, a Sporting Lisbon fan, paid for a
two-month residency. When that expired, the club were impressed enough to hand Bernardo a place for free.
Ultimately, a little boy’s dream died at the hands of coach Jorge Jesus 12 years later. Jesus thought Bernardo was too small, playing him at left back one pre-season before dumping him in the B team.
Unsure about his future in the game, Bernardo enrolled at university before Monaco saved him. He has not seen Jesus since. ‘He didn’t think I was good enough to play for Benfica and that’s fine,’ Bernardo explained.
‘I had to find another way to keep going. No problems at all with him but nor are we friends! When I first left I wanted to prove them wrong. That did motivate me but not any more.
‘I think what I did at Monaco and at City and for the national team, I think people in Portugal recognise that good work.
‘I would like to go back to Benfica one day. There is a gap to fill. I was a young kid who had a dream of playing for his home club and not being able to fulfil that dream was hard. But I had to make some decisions and I don’t regret it at all.’
In metropolitan Manchester, under the workaholic Guardiola, Bernardo thinks he has found a home. The City dressing room — where Oasis’s Wonderwall is played before every home game — is a good one, he believes, and a commonly held ambition to make up for missteps in the Champions League drives them forward.
‘I have had some bad dressing rooms, and some amazing ones and this one is one of them,’ he said.
‘It makes a huge difference when it comes to winning titles. To have team-mates that — if they play 90 minutes or just five minutes or no minutes – that are always there for you, is so important.
‘And Pep will not stop. Yes, we know how to play football but it doesn’t matter if you are one of the best players in the world or playing in the second division, you can always improve and if you can accept that then you can accept that your manager will always be telling you things. If you are intelligent, you realise that when your manager speaks to you in a certain way it’s not to upset you but to try to improve you and the team.’
Bernardo’s importance to Guardiola’s second phase at the club is clear. When he looks around, he sees others on the rise: players such as left back Oleksandr Zinchenko and midfielder Phil Foden.
Foden has played only 10 minutes this season but Bernardo said: ‘When I was in Portugal and a good one came through from Benfica, Sporting or Porto people wanted them to develop as fast as possible. So it’s normal.
‘But not many players can go from young teams at Barcelona, Real Madrid, City, Liverpool into the first team when they are 19. That’s normal too.
‘Look, Phil wants to play and that’s OK but look at the players he has ahead in his position. So it’s not easy. I do think he will be able to play regularly for this club but he just needs to be calm.’
As for Bernardo, those days of youthful uncertainty are behind him. His responsibility now — at least in part — is to lead an evolving team in to the future.
‘I feel I am better adapted now,’ he said. ‘The difference of working with the same manager and same teammates for three months or two years makes a huge difference.
‘For example when you pass to Raz [Raheem Sterling] you know where exactly you have to put the ball. When you first arrive, you don’t know that. You learn it.
‘When David [Silva] leaves he will be in the top three or five that ever played here. Vinny as well, Yaya and Kun. It’s good to be considered a legend, as they are called. We are just trying to be as good as they were.
‘The young players that arrived at the club recently want to be like them. They are great examples to follow. That is where we want to go.’
‘I have very big shoes to fill when David Silva leaves... he’s a legend’
‘We want three titles in a row. The target is to be a team that constantly dominates English football... a special team’