City can triumph if Pep keeps it simple
EIGHT minutes in August. That was all it took to ruin a dream last season. Just eight minutes.
In that time in Lisbon’s Estadio Jose Alvalade, Manchester City’s chances of a first Champions League triumph slipped away.
Drawing 1-1 with Lyon with 11 minutes of their quarter-final remaining, City conceded two quick goals. They were bad ones, too. In between them, Raheem Sterling missed a sitter. From right in it to categorically and conclusively dumped out of it. All in the blink of an eye.
Lyon were the seventh best team in France last season. It was a game City should not have lost and coach Pep Guardiola admitted yesterday that he took a while to get over it.
‘Of course it stayed in my head for weeks,’ said Guardiola. ‘It was the summer time, the last game of the season. It was painful. I can’t deny. We wanted to go through. We didn’t deserve to go through and of course it was hard.
‘But, yes, a defeat like that hurts. Normally you lose and then you have the Premier League or the FA Cup. But this time it was completely different.
‘The day after, we said goodbye to everyone and went on our holidays. I was just disappointed. Now we are here again, to try it again.’
City and the Champions League have been an uncomfortable fit for years. Just one semi-final — back in the days of Manuel Pellegrini in 2016 — to show for their years of hope and toil.
Last year felt like an opportunity, with the latter stages of the competition crammed in to a winner-takes-all series of one off games in Portugal.
But so, too, does this year’s edition. Barcelona are already out. So are Juventus. Real Madrid and Liverpool are about to play each other.
So City’s quarter-final meeting with Borussia Dortmund that begins at the Etihad Stadium tonight has the look of a half-open door to be leaned on once again.
There has been much talk about Dortmund this season but it has tended to focus on individuals. The precocious Erling Haaland may well be a City player next season. Jude Bellingham and Jadon Sancho — just 17 and 21 — are both English. Sancho, of course, is a product of the City academy.
But what has tended to be overlooked is that Dortmund’s football has recently failed to live up to the sum of the team’s talented parts.
The German side have won just one of their last five games and the weekend’s home defeat to Eintracht Frankfurt left them 19 points behind leaders Bayern Munich in fifth position.
City, therefore, are favourites to progress. Their own form is rich and they were impressive in Saturday’s Premier League win at Leicester. Their best players are where they need to be — or approaching it.
So the major obstacles to progress may well lie within. City can tend to be over-zealous in this competition, while their manager can be tempted to overthink things. His selection decisions for the defeat to Lyon last summer included leaving out Phil Foden and John Stones. If it felt clever at the start, it looked anything but by the end.
What City need this time, one feels, is merely an extension of what they do every week in the Premier League.
This has been a different City this year in some ways. They have a midfielder, Ilkay Gundogan, as the top scorer for example, but the fundamentals remain the same. Keep the ball and use the ball. It was something Guardiola alluded to when asked about the danger posed by Haaland.
‘He is fantastic and everyone knows it,’ said Guardiola. ‘A blind guy can realise he’s fantastic. You don’t have to be a manager to know it. But the striker who scores goals has more chances to score when in our box. Far away from our box they have less chances. It’s not mathematics. The best way is to avoid them being there as much as possible.’
Guardiola dealt with the torrent of Haaland (left) questions with patience yesterday. The young Norwegian remains City’s prime summer target but there is not much Guardiola can reasonably be expected to say about that.
What is more pertinent to him — something he really does feel — is a personal fallow period in the Champions League that now extends a decade back to his last triumph with Barcelona in 2011.
Nobody ever expected his wait for the next one to be so long. Nobody really thought City would require so much patience before reaching a final either. The two missions are now linked like twine.
‘Life is such that you stand up again,’ said Guardiola in the moments after last season’s disaster in Lisbon. ‘So we will try again next year.’
And now next year is here. City will try again.
The defeat to Lyon last year was painful. It stayed in my head for weeks