CANCELO CULTURE
Portuguese is the star of Guardiola’s total football
PEP GUARDIOLA believes Joao Cancelo plays like he’s in love with football.
And the Manchester City boss reckons his brilliant Portugal defender is amongst kindred spirits at the Etihad.
Cancelo has become the epitome of a Guardiola fullback over the last two seasons, despite a difficult start following his arrival from Juventus in a £60million deal that saw Danilo move in the opposite direction.
One moment the 27-year-old is halting attacks, the next operating as a central midfielder and providing the kind of passes that would make Kevin De Bruyne purr.
Guardiola said: “When a player arrives from another culture – Spain or Italy – they need time to adapt.
“Since arriving, Joao has played at a high level because he has one huge quality – he loves to play football.
“He likes training sessions and would play football 24 hours a day, every single day. When you find a player like
that, like Riyad Mahrez or like
Phil Foden, wow, you have a diamond on your hands.
“Most of the players like to play football but, in those three examples, I see them like little boys playing in the street when they are eight, nine, 10 years old.
“They play football now like they were in the street or at school.
“The best players always play it as professionals like they did as amateurs. In their lives there is not another thing more
important than football, that’s like when you’re a little boy with your friends, like you played football then.
“That’s the happiest moment in life. Of course the wages are higher than when you are at school but you enjoy it the same.”
Philipp Lahm reinvented the full-back position when he worked with Guardiola at Bayern Munich. At Barcelona, he gave Dani Alves license to
attack. The City boss thinks Cancelo is made from the same stuff, but what makes his contribution even more startling is that he has been operating at left-back despite being naturally right-footed.
Guardiola added: “Right now, Joao is playing like Philipp at Bayern when we were together. In that position, the full-back inside and not just overlapping, Philipp is the best player I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Never have I seen a full-back move inside, moving into the pockets close to the holding midfielder.
“Joao, like Dani Alves, should play in that position.”
City have won three of the last four Premier League titles and Guardiola feels his team have performed better in collecting two wins and a draw from Old Trafford, Stamford Bridge and Anfield than at any time during his Etihad reign.
They host Everton today with a warning from their manager that they will have to improve again if they want to retain their crown.
He added: “In the big games this season we have responded amazingly in the quality of our play and the way we competed.
“But to win the Premier League you have to be a machine.
“To be at that level and to maintain it, you have to be even better. And I have the feeling they can do even better, I push them to raise those standards.
“Our opponents improve and so we have to as well. If people believe it is enough to win again with what we have done in the past, it won’t be.”
character in the squad.” Asked how he plans to go about addressing Everton’s occasional frailty, Benitez used an example from last week’s training sessions at Finch Farm.
He added: “We had a possession game and one team was losing and then I said, ‘We cannot give up, we have to continue’.
“These kinds of things you can do in every training session.
“After, if you win the game on Saturday or Sunday, the players have more belief, but it takes time.” Everton’s resilience will be tested at Manchester City this afternoon.
But Benitez pulled off a surprise win over Pep Guardiola’s side when he was at Newcastle – and has a plan to repeat the trick.
Dangerous
He explained: “Everybody knows that City have plenty of possession.
“But they can play counterattack, they can play with the wingers, with the full-backs overlapping, through the middle with penetrating passes.
“The only way for us is to just make sure we are very strong defensively as a unit.
“Then we can try to be dangerous on the counter-attack.
“It’s not a secret that they will have the possession and then we have to make sure that we are dangerous when the chance comes to counter-attack. That’s it.”