Pep delivered City’s greatest team talk of the season
Guardiola’s passion will inspire his players
Guardiola was standing inside the baseline and taking the ball early. If it comes at you fast, return it even harder
FROM Pep Guardiola, there was initially a pause, a sigh and then a step back in time. It was three years ago this month that Manchester City were accused by UEFA of breaking their financial regulations. Eventually, City found a way through that one. Guilty in small part, but not of the really serious stuff.
This time it is the Premier League that have their tanks parked on City’s manicured lawn. Guardiola, the head coach, believes there to be 19 of them, each one draped in the colours of the other Premier League clubs he suspects are driving this latest attempt to prove City have funded their extraordinary modern trophy haul in ways that contravene the rule book.
Sitting behind a desk at the extravagant City training complex built by Abu Dhabi money — with a reserve stadium many lower-league clubs would covet visible through the windows to his left — Guardiola looked, at first, like a man rather wearied by the fact he was being asked to go through all of this again.
But that countenance was to change quite rapidly and quite spectacularly. Twenty minutes later, Guardiola finally reached the end of a defence of his football club so powerful, passionate and deeply felt that it may yet have a profound impact on how this season — if not this legal case — eventually plays out.
Placed in these situations, football managers have two options. The first is to declare such subjects beyond their control and remit. The ‘my job is just to coach the team’ approach. The second is to put the gloves on, take a deep push back on to the ropes and then come out swinging.
Here, in this cavernous and high-ceilinged room where questions and answers about hamstring pulls and groin strains are usually exchanged, this was Guardiola stripped to the waist.
He cares about this stuff, for sure. Of course he does. What option does he really have?
If the 52-year-old allowed himself to think that the castle he has built over the last seven years sits on dirty foundations, then what reason is there to get out of bed tomorrow? What reason is there to remain in Manchester?
So, yes, Guardiola believes in this, in his club’s declarations of innocence. He believes the rules have been constructed by English football’s traditional elite to keep City out of the golden circle.
And he believes his club has gate-crashed the party regardless while remaining the right side of the parameters constructed first by UEFA and then by the Premier League.
So this was Guardiola on the front foot. This was Guardiola standing inside the baseline and taking the ball early. If it comes at you fast, return it even harder. That was the policy and it paid off for now. As City supporters sat in their armchairs or watched this on their mobile phones yesterday afternoon, they will never have loved their man more.
Whether City are innocent or not, the reality of all that was suspended for the blue half of Manchester yesterday afternoon. If Pep says we are good, then we are good.
And that is what great leaders do. They see a fire and run towards it.
There were holes in Guardiola’s argument. When he says City proved themselves innocent of UEFA’s charges via a successful appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport last time round, he is only part right.
Some of the charges laid down by European football’s governing body were, said CAS, time-barred. They had been lodged too late. This is not expected to apply to the Premier League.
It is also faintly preposterous to suggest with such certainty that all 19 Premier League clubs resent City’s presence at the top end of the table.
That may or may not apply to teams such as Tottenham (chairman Daniel Levy was the one person to get a Guardiola name-check), Everton, Arsenal and Manchester United — clubs who have found it harder to win things and qualify for European competition since City walked through the door with petrodollars falling out of their pockets after the Abu Dhabi takeover of 2008.
But Southampton, Fulham, Brentford, Crystal Palace, Bournemouth, Brighton and Wolves? It is probably harder to make a convincing case that they give much of a stuff for what’s happening in the top one or two places of a competition in which they know they will always be supporting acts.
But all of this is what the point is not, as the Arctic Monkeys once said. The point is that Guardiola’s performance here will have resonated through his football club and through the Premier League. We won’t take a step back. We will not waver. And if you do send us back through the divisions, we will come back again. Even, he joked, with the help of dear Mike Summerbee, who last kicked a ball so gracefully for the club in 1975.
GUARDIOLA was asked during this press conference whether the events of this week will motivate his players, and he said that they would not. He was right about that. Modern footballers live in a bubble. It is not a stretch to suggest there will be some within Guardiola’s squad who will not even know these charges have been laid against the club.
But this issue is actually more nuanced than that. Not all players watch, listen or read the news — but they do listen to their manager. As such, the conviction, intensity and passion of Guardiola’s address will have reached them within minutes of the words tumbling in a torrent from his mouth.
City’s players — not particularly convincing by their standards recently — will be revved up by this. So, too, will the supporters who saw them lose at Tottenham last weekend and not long ago across town at Old Trafford.
As a result, the Etihad will be jumping like it rarely does when Aston Villa turn up to take on City tomorrow afternoon. In terms of an adrenaline boost to City’s season, Guardiola may just have delivered the most effective team talk of his year so far.
Much of what we have heard this week has been so reminiscent of three years ago. The gravity of the charges, the robustness of the response, the feeling that we are all in for a long haul before this thing is eventually resolved.
Shortly after we rode this horse for the first time, the world changed. Covid struck, football paused and here in the back end of winter 2023 there are still some things that do not yet feel back to normal.
Some things did bounce back pretty rapidly, though. In football, rivalry, spite and nastiness — some real and some imagined — never really went away.
In some territories, feelings run deeper than ever. Over at Manchester City they certainly do. Us against the rest of the world. If anybody in possession of a sky blue scarf didn’t buy into that before, they certainly will now.