REALITY BITES FOR CITY AND GUARDIOLA
Reality of life in Premier League hitting Pep hard as chinks appear in City’s armour
IF YOU thought Jose Mourinho looked miserable at Manchester United a couple of months ago, have you seen Pep Guardiola lately? The Manchester City boss clearly struggles to hide his emotions when he gets stressed and fed up, or when he doesn’t like the line of questioning from journalists.
And this is when he’s winning. When I saw him give his awkward TV interviews after the Burnley game, I immediately thought there was another agenda.
It made no sense otherwise. His team had just won and he was wrong to blame the officials for the decisions he felt went against him.
He was just rude and disrespectful towards two journalists just trying to do their jobs and who really did not ask a question that was out of order. He was clearly upset about the Fernandinho sending off – even though it was totally justified – and a perfectly legal Burnley goal.
Like his players, Guardiola clearly felt that Claudio Bravo was fouled by Andre Gray. And he was. But that was after Ben Mee had scored a goal which was given by the decision review system. I fail to see why Guardiola was so confused. There was certainly no foul by Mee on Bravo before that.
Once again Guardiola has had to leap to his keeper’s defence. The latest excuse is that he was fouled gathering a cross he should have dealt with strongly and comfortably. But he can’t.
He surely has to realise that he is going to get stick when City lose, or things are not going his way. Or when Bravo drops another clanger; the keeper he bought to replace Joe Hart.
And if he was not prepared for that when he went into management, then he will never be able to handle the Premier League.
The real frustration for Guardiola was not the alleged foul on his dodgy keeper or another red card for a player who is surely heading out the door. It was the Liverpool defeat. He knows that was costly and his team were poor just two nights earlier.
That was a season-defining game and Manchester City have fallen away in the title race after the defeat at Anfield.
They played well against Burnley after going down to 10 men. You could see that Burnley were set up to hurt City, but after Fernandinho’s dismissal, Sean Dyche admitted his players didn’t know how to react.
But City were brave and I was very impressed with their secondhalf performance. The game should have been over before Mee’s goal.
There is very little about the Premier League and its unique challenges and global interest which will have surprised Guardiola.
However, I suspect he is surprised at how poor some of his players are. By his standards. And that is why Manchester City, under Guardiola, are not finding it easy.
He has had his way for a long time. He’s the first to admit he had Lionel Messi at Barcelona and was able to buy Robert Lewandowski for Bayern Munich. And let’s be honest, he was expected to win those leagues with those players.
But he does think his team can beat anybody with his style and that was all fine when they won 10 in a row at the start of the season.
When results didn’t go their way, chinks started to appear in the team and, everyone can see that they are weak defensively.
He has brought the Brazilian Gabriel Jesus in, but he is another attacking player and will need time. Guardiola needs to buy three defenders after spending £47.5 million on John Stones in the summer as a long-term investment.
Apart from Stones, it is the same back four from last season and he is not going to solidify a defence or make them difficult to break down.
When he was appointed, I said this would be his biggest challenge and I believe he has found that to be the case. He knows the majority of the squad are not good enough, not quick enough and have not learnt enough so far to put his vision into practice.
Of course Manchester City sides will score goals but they cannot sustain that way of playing while they are so open at the back.
Managers like Mourinho, Guardiola and Arsene Wenger suffer mental anguish and stress on match days and sometimes you wonder if they really enjoy the job. Even Jurgen Klopp looked like he had aged overnight after Liverpool’s draw at Sunderland on Monday.
Sam Allardyce once said that football management is the best job in the world, until you get to match day. Very few managers would disagree, I’m sure.
MANY players go into coaching and they love coaching at youth level. Even Guardiola is on record saying that his happiest time in football, apart from playing, was coaching in the Barcelona academy and B team.
Not many ex-pros want to make that step up into management. There is a different type of enjoyment and involvement with players’ development at that level. And then there is the very public aspect to managing a club which you don’t have to worry about standing by the side of the Under-14s’ pitch.
You look at what the madness of the Premier League does to the very best coaches and it’s no surprise many prefer the ‘easy life’ in coaching. And the management madness continues at the other end of the Premier League table…
There can’t be many out there who haven’t had to stick Marco Silva into a search engine this week after he was appointed Hull City manager. I mean, who is he? Well, he is the former manager of Olympiakos – won a record 17 games on the bounce for them – and he had brief stints with Estoril and Sporting Lisbon in his native Portugal and he is a mate of Jose Mourinho’s. Silva is just 39, three years younger than Mourinho was when he first went to England, so it’s no surprise he has been touted as ‘the new Mourinho’.
That he is a client of Jorge Mendes (who happens to be the Manchester United manager’s agent) is no surprise either.
Of all the gambles taken by Premier League clubs, this has to be one of the biggest. It’s not like they have hired a Tony Pulis or Sam Allardyce, experienced managers who have never been relegated.
The Hull City board have only got themselves to blame for the mess the club is in and it seems unlikely they will have to extend Silva’s contract beyond the end of this season because he’s kept them up. He’s signed an 18-month contract, but that could be terminated in May if Hull are relegated.
Hull’s owners wouldn’t give Steve Bruce money to invest in the team, so he quit. Then, when he was appointed, Mike Phelan bemoaned the size and quality of his squad, but nothing was done. And they clearly didn’t trust him to spend any money in January, so they sacked him.
Now with Silva it seems inconceivable that promises will not have been made about spending money or bringing players in on short-term deals. That stinks to high heaven.
Mendes and Silva may have the contacts but January transfers very rarely work out, particularly en masse, so there is another risk for the Hull board. I’ll be very surprised if Hull stay up – and if Silva is still here next season. Another manager I’d love to see succeed is Paul Clement, who took over at Swansea City this week following Bob Bradley’s sacking.
He worked very briefly with the senior Ireland team under Don Givens, and also had a spell with the Under-21s. And there’s no questioning his background and experience after time coaching with Chelsea, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich.
Swansea chairman Huw Jenkins says Clement is the perfect fit thanks to that experience. But Real Madrid and Bayern Munich have absolutely no relevance to the Swansea job or the position they are in.
It’s another massive appointment and risk which Swansea need to come off.