City hire coach without a trophy in 37 years

MANCHESTER. — On the face of it, Manchester City’s proposed new management may seem like a mismatch.

In the top job remains Pep Guardiola, who has won league titles in Spain, Germany and England, putting together some of the greatest sides in history in the process.

Soon to be alongside him on the bench will be Juanma Lillo, a wandering journeyman whose 37-year career to date shows a long list of jobs and not a single title, major or minor.

However, City’s assistant-in-waiting is no footballing incompetent — on the contrary, Pep himself credits Lillo with making a vital contribution to his understanding of the game.

Indeed, Lillo was nothing short of a trailblazer when he first took up coaching, getting his first break at the improbably young age of 17 with local club Amaroz Ke in his native Tolosa before achieving moderate success at a host of lower-league outfits.

By 1995, he had become the youngest coach in the history of La Liga at just 29, guiding Salamanca up to the top flight from the third-tier Segunda Division B.

Salamanca’s stay in Primera proved short, with Lillo relieved of his duties midway through the 1995-96 season, which ended in relegation for the club.

The following summer, however, he was back, this time at the helm of Oviedo, and an otherwise routine defeat to mighty Barcelona proved a pivotal moment in the career of the Catalans’ midfield general Guardiola.

“We lost 4-2, but we played really well,” Lillo recalled to reporters. “Suddenly, there was a knock on the dressing room door and Pep was there; he hadn’t changed yet.

“He had come to ask me if I minded chatting for a minute — as if I was going to be annoyed about talking to the best centre-midfielder in the history of football.

“He told me he loved how I put my team together and wanted to stay in touch. What started as a professional thing soon turned into much more.”

Such was Guardiola’s respect for Lillo that before Barca’s 2003 presidential election, he promised to make the Basque coach if he were appointed the club’s new director of football by Lluis Bassat, who was running for the top job at Camp Nou.

That Dream Team never came to fruition, though, as Bassat lost out to Joan Laporta, but when Lillo subsequently took charge of Mexico’s Dorados he called on Pep to add vital experience to his side and the midfielder jumped at the chance to join his friend in Sinaloa.

Sebastian Abreu, who also formed part of that Dorados team, later revealed that Guardiola was almost obsessive in his eagerness to learn from Lillo.

“On the day Pep arrived, he watched our training session and ran off to the dressing room to look for a pen and pad. He called over, grabbed Juanma by the arm and sat down with him,” the Uruguay legend recalled to ESPN.

“This goes on every day — Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday — and we start to get intrigued. If I learned one thing in my career, it’s that the stars are like sponges, so I go and ask, ‘Can I come too?’ Pep said ‘Sure, no problem.’

“So, I went, sat down and didn’t say anything. Pep would say, ‘OK Juanma, we did reduced spaces today, three against three with a man spare – why?’

“He wanted to find out the objective of every training session, if it was to mould the team or to find out about the opponent. He knew it was never just training for the sake of it with Juanma.

“One day Juanma said to me, ‘Look closely at Pep; this guy has no limits. Remember that.”

What looks like a mismatch could well prove to be a match made in heaven. — Goal.com.

LONDON. — Five years and five fights involving three Americans added up to the golden years of heavyweight boxing.

During that period, from 1971 to 1975, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman starred in The Fight of the Century, The Rumble in the Jungle and The Thrilla in Manila.

Those years are still regarded as the greatest era in the history of heavyweight boxing and the three giants of sport were later all inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

It was also, of course, the time of Watergate, Vietnam, and Richard Nixon.

Richard Hoffer has written an excellent book about those years, the boxers and the fights. The title is Bouts of Mania — Ali* Frazier* Foreman and an America on the Ropes.

In the prologue, Hoffer writes: “Muhammad Ali, fresh off a political exile, his hands still as quick as his mouth; Joe Frazier, the sharecropper’s son, the heavyweight champion in Ali’s absence, a virtual threshing machine; George Foreman, the huge, thunderous puncher who was promising to make both his elders, and maybe even the sport, obsolete.

“Each an Olympic gold medal winner, each undefeated, and each in his time heavyweight champion of the world. Pick one and he might have dominated boxing during a period when the game still mattered, galvanised his country for years with oversized exploits. He might, in