Scottish Daily Mail

MEETING OF MINDS

Bielsa and Guardiola are deep thinkers about the game who once chewed the football fat for 11 hours over an Argentinia­n BBQ

- By IAN HERBERT

THE story of their legendary meeting has surfaced again, as it does whenever their paths cross in football. It’s a tale of how Pep Guardiola, a recently retired player, beat a path to the ranch retreat of Marcelo Bielsa — mentor, maestro, manager — in Rosario, Argentina, and received tablets of wisdom as they roasted haunches of meat together on an open fire, in 2006.

The almost comical intensity of their supposed 11- hour talk that day in 2006 — with Bielsa’s computer being used to check facts and settle arguments, and Guardiola’s film director friend David Trueba being positioned between two chairs to act out a tactical move at one stage — has given risen to the assumption that tactics dominated talk.

But Guardiola’s favourite Bielsa axiom is about how to deal with winning and losing. It is said to have been the first thing he scribbled, in black marker pen, on the whiteboard positioned between a Noel Gallagher caricature and a framed verse of the musician’s song Rock ‘n’ Roll Star in his manager’s office at the Etihad Campus. And it seems incredibly relevant to the meeting of their Leeds United and Manchester City teams in Yorkshire today.

‘The moments in my life when I have improved are closely related to failure,’ reads the Bielsa maxim. ‘The moments in my life when I have regressed are closely related to success. Being successful deforms us as human beings. It relaxes us. It plays tricks on us. It makes us worse individual­s. It feeds our egos. Failure forms us, makes us more solid, brings us closer to our conviction­s. It makes us more coherent.’

That’s a lot of words and you wonder whether Guardiola really did scrawl out the entire thing, as his close friend and writer Lu Martin suggests in his book Pep’s City: The Making of a Superteam. But Bielsa knows that the man 16 years his junior will have viewed last weekend’s 5-2 home defeat to Leicester through that kind of prism and spent the past six days looking for answers.

‘Above all he is imaginativ­e,’ Bielsa said of Guardiola, through his translator in Leeds, this week. ‘He is able to instantly create solutions to problems he comes across. And what he proposes, he is able to implement. We imagine football in a narrow way. Guardiola imagines football in a free way.

‘I do not feel like his mentor. That is not how it is. Here is a manager who is independen­t in his ideas. The ideas are his own and not just because I say (there) is (a way of playing).’

The pair have not spoken this week. They are a generation apart — Guardiola currently doing for tapered cargo pants what Bielsa is not achieving for baggy tracksuit bottoms — but they share the same philosophy about pressing the ball high up the pitch.

In one of the few detailed discussion­s of the Rosario barbecue, in the widely respected 2016 book Pep Guardiola: The Evolution, he is quoted as saying that the meeting was key to him developing the idea of the press in the first place.

‘ I started to play with this idea after a chat with Marcelo,’ Guardiola tells author Marti Perarnau, to whom he granted exceptiona­l access for this and a second book. ‘ We met up in Buenos Aires to talk football. It’s important to spend time with people who talk so much sense. Obviously if even one or two of your players can’t handle it, then forget (the system). But if they’re all willing and able, then I’d love to force the other team back into their area and not give them even a sniff of the ball for the whole 90 minutes.’

Last Sunday’s catastroph­e against Brendan Rodgers’ team revealed that not all of Guardiola’s players were ‘able’. The side lacked muscularit­y and fundamenta­l alertness. Rodri, failing to close down in central areas, once more looked a shadow of the player Fernandinh­o has been when shielding defence against sides who seek to counter-attack.

‘To imagine (playing) football this way doesn’t mean footballer­s are going to act in the same way,’ Bielsa said of the pressing system this week. This was not a criticism of City. ‘ I never f i nd i t very comfortabl­e to talk about an opponents’ weaknesses,’ he said.

‘The season is very short and it is very hard to mark conclusion­s as to whether they are weaker than before. To talk about an opponent’s weakness in public is never a comfortabl­e thing.’

But while his own players might lack the technical excellence of Guardiola’s, on current form they look far more incisive. It’s eight years since Bielsa’s last meeting with Guardiola — his Athletic Bilbao side’s 3-0 Copa del Rey final defeat in Madrid which marked the end of the Catalan’s era at Barcelona. But he l ooks the more effective of the two when it comes to moulding raw material at his disposal.

Jack Harrison, loaned out to Leeds by City and absent today under the terms of that agreement, has improved hugely under his coaching. So, too, Kalvin Phillips and Mateusz Klich — both players reborn, even though they receive his verbal instructio­ns through a translator. Sources in Spain suggest that Bielsa also told Guardiola in Rosario that spotting good players was one thing but improving them within the system a far greater skill.

Guardiola, who has claimed 30 trophies to Bielsa’s six as a

manager, has worked at wealthier clubs where the need is less, though he can point to Seydou Keita at Barcelona and Raheem Sterling among those he has transforme­d.

Against Liverpool three weeks ago, Bielsa had f i ve players operating high up the pitch to bypass the best pressing side in the Premier League and emerged with three goals.

That tactic could damage a City central defence which never recovered from Vincent Kompany’s departure and is reinforced today by Ruben Dias. The 23-year-old, whose £65million arrival from Benfica has taken Pep’s spending on defenders to more than £400m, carries the weight of City’s system on his shoulders. The side have struggled to develop the elite centre-halves needed to prevent their ambitious high line leaving them wide open at the back.

But Leeds have looked defensivel­y vulnerable, too, with Robin Koch yet to settle. Bielsa says he takes no encouragem­ent from the fact City would operate with a false No 9 today, removing the same central attacking threat that Liverpool and Fulham posed.

There are symmetric al philosophi­es and weaknesses, then, though all the pressure resides with the man who came looking for some answers that day on the plains of north- east Argentina and who is now in need of more.

‘I don’t see him quite as much,’ Guardiola said of Bielsa yesterday. ‘I don’t see him every week. But when I do get the pleasure to spend time with him, it’s always inspiratio­nal for me. He is probably the person I admire the most in world football, as a manager and as a person. Nobody can imitate him.

‘The value of the manager does not depend on how many titles or prizes you have won. My teams might have won more but, in terms of knowledge of the game and many, many things, I am still far away from him.’

 ?? AP ?? Old master: Bielsa is making the most of his materials at Leeds
AP Old master: Bielsa is making the most of his materials at Leeds
 ??  ??
 ?? GETTY IMAGES ?? Winner: but Guardiola still looks up to the Argentine
GETTY IMAGES Winner: but Guardiola still looks up to the Argentine

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom