Guardiola’s artists succeed in embellishing our game
City cannot yet claim to be the Premier League’s best ever side – but they look well on the way
The heart is a good place to look for measures. In that deeper realm, Pep Guardiola’s first title-winning Manchester City side made the Premier League more inspiring, lavishing an art explosion on the English game and closing the gap between our top division and the aesthetes of Spain.
In all aspects, English football is improved and embellished by the successful Barcelona implant undertaken by Guardiola. The brief to recreate a form of Catalonia’s symphonic football in Manchester is no fiction. It was City’s stated plan. Guardiola may not live to see Catalonian independence, but he has created a satellite of his homeland on a patch of Manchester where the grandfather of Mike Atherton, the former England cricket captain, went down a mine.
Transformation has occurred by money, yes, but also by faith in creativity, ingenuity, speed, skill, vision, all of which are part instinctive, part training ground drill. Early in this Premier League campaign, it was obvious City had assembled an unplayable ensemble of attacking midfielders, who, if rotated, and motivated across 38 league games, would befuddle most English opponents.
Guardiola’s “overload” theory was honed at Barcelona, where he always endeavoured to outnumber the enemy in vital areas of the pitch. At City he has achieved a similar aim by stockpiling destructive midfield talents, to the point where a player of Bernardo Silva’s quality struggles to make the starting XI. The piano-carriers are less numerous – and surely Fernandinho deserves an internal special award as best supporting actor – but in Premier League action, at least, City’s investment in sweeping interplay has been vindicated. Yes they spent big, but they also spent beautifully.
No team who lose a Champions League quarter final 5-1 on aggregate to a side below them in the domestic table or drop out of the FA Cup at Wigan can be truly be called “dominant”, but City achieved their noble aim of overwhelming positivity in the competition they now need to ‘own’ rather than just win and then hand back 12 months later.
Before their three defeats in a week against Liverpool (twice) and Manchester United caused a rewrite, City’s dazzling Premier League form had caused us to fixate on whether this was the “best” team in the division’s history, which is now commonly believed to have begun in 1992-93.
Trophies remain the correct gauge – and by that standard the treble-winning Manchester United side of 1999 are impregnable, because no side had won the League, FA Cup and Champions League in a single campaign (United rounded it off inside 10 days). There is also a case to make for the 2008 United Champions League-winning team adorned by Cristiano Ronaldo in his English pomp. If all other competitions are set aside, Guardiola’s City cannot match Arsenal’s 2003-04 ‘Invincibles’, who won 26 games and drew 12 in an era when Arsene Wenger’s teams were as entertaining as Guardiola’s City are now, though more direct (on the ground) and less elaborate.
Late winter’s obsession with City’s apparent rise to all-time No1 assumed they were going to knock off a quadruple of targets rather than lose in the FA Cup at Wigan and bounce off a Liverpool side perfectly constructed to exploit their vulnerability to counterstrikes and attacking pressure. The weakness in City’s make-up has less to do with the quality of their defenders than the psychological shock when the opposition take control of the flow – the difficulty in switching between swaggering ball-retention and zealous protection of their own net.
That balance is the final frontier for Guardiola as a coach, who will try to cross it by investing in at least one defensive midfielder and perhaps keep upgrading his centre-backs; yet the weakness is less to do with the names on shirts than the style of play, which, like the best forms of art, is innovative and risky. At City, Guardiola lacks the ultimate insurance policy that is Lionel Messi, the point of difference in his success at Barcelona.
But when the carousel stops, the Premier League will feel like a better place for City moving the boundaries of what is possible in the intense, physical English game. Their second-half performance against Spurs at Wembley on Saturday removed any flimsy suspicion that Guardiola’s team lack character, or were imploding.
City have moved the boundaries of what is possible in the intense, physical English game
David Silva lack character? Or Kevin De Bruyne?
The stats speak of a grand design beautifully executed. After the 3-1 win at Spurs, City had scored 93 times and conceded 25 in 33 games, with 15 clean sheets. The League’s top three ‘assisters’ were all City men: De Bruyne with 15, Leroy Sane with 12 and David Silva with 11. From the erratic finishing of Raheem Sterling, Guardiola had extracted 17 goals. City’s haul of 24,195 passes placed them nearly 4,000 clear of Liverpool in second. This was not “sterile domination”, but relentless use of possession to seek openings and angles and dazzling combinations.
There were days this season when City were an event, a rolling ‘wow’. Part butterfly collector, part martinet, Guardiola found a way to make the talent at his disposal unplayable, or unanswerable. There were games when he removed the opposition from the equation by confronting them with a level of play that could not be stopped. The best: no, not yet. But they are on the right track.