Pep’s facing a big challenge in City rebuild
GUARDIOLA TASKED WITH FIXING BLUES MISFORTUNE
WHEN Pep Guardiola finally emerged from the away dressing room at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Sunday night he did all he could to play down the dramatic debrief of a sixth Premier League defeat of the season.
The manager, his staff and the
City squad remained shut inside the dressing room for 45 minutes, with the Blues boss not appearing for his obligatory post-match press conference until more than an hour after the final whistle had blown on the 2-0 defeat to Spurs.
Yet Guardiola insisted he was happy with the performance. On the face if it you can see why,
City were dominant until Aleks Zinchenko was sent-off.
But this was an afternoon of familiar failings.
Not taking chances, being caught on the break and individual mistakes. It was the missed chances Guardiola turned to again and again post-match, but they mask the suspicion that all is not as perfect as it has been at the Etihad in the previous two seasons.
When asked about the dressing room dressing-down, Guardiola insisted it was actually a discussion about ‘moving forward’ and finding new motivation for this season, given the Premier League title has now gone.
But perhaps Guardiola’s most illuminating comment was asked how he could fix City’s issues of dominating games, missing chances and conceding goals when the opposition create so few chances. “I don’t know,” was the response. This is what makes Guardiola’s next season in Manchester perhaps the most fascinating – and most important – of his managerial career. City have had their fair share of misfortune this season, failing to win games they have controlled, but there look to be deeper issues within the squad as well.
How Guardiola goes about fixing this will be intriguing.
The Catalan has consistently said he intends to stay for the 2020/21 season, at the end of which his contract will be up, and he has even hinted at signing a new deal to extend his Etihad reign into a sixth year, but this is uncharted territory for him.
He dominated La Liga with Barcelona for three seasons, but left at the end of his fourth, when Real Madrid had broken the hegemony. In the Bundesliga Guardiola’s Bayern Munich steamrollered all before them.
City didn’t have it all their own way in Guardiola’s first season in England, but there was always the sense he was building something and so it proved over the previous two seasons, with those back-toback titles and 198 points.
But that first great side of
Guardiola’s City era looks to be coming to an end.
Now he has a challenge he’s not encountered before, in building a new dynasty and overthrowing a team who have managed to usurp his own.
How he goes about doing that will tell us more about the most revolutionary, forward thinking manager of this era.
He’s built one great team in Manchester, now he might need to make a few tweaks and do so again.
On Sunday Guardiola was adamant his side would continue to play the same way.
“I always believe for the statistics we create more than the opponent you normally win the games, that’s what we have to do, I know what you have to do,” he said.
“I’ve lived this position as a football player and a manager, it’s not the first we’ve played good but not scored goals. We are going to work on that.”
Guardiola also intimated that he was already thinking about next season, when for arguably the first time in his career the dynamic will have changed.
City under Guardiola are about to become the hunters rather than the hunted.
Whether it’s modifications to a style, a change of personnel or an unwavering belief in Plan A, how they go about that will be fascinating to watch.