MANCHESTER CITY will get there soon and win the Champions League – there can be no doubts about that.

Abu Dhabi has the money to be able to affect outcomes very, very quickly and the more you keep something at arm’s length from multi-millionaires and billionaires, the more they want it.

So the bad news for those who were wondering whether Pep Guardiola might walk away from City after failing to land the trophy again is that he won’t – there’s no chance of that happening.

Because it will be even more desirable than ever for City and Guardiola to be able to get their hands on the trophy – and they will, sooner rather than later.

But what does get me going about everything I’ve heard and read this week is that football hipsters and plenty of journalists have maintained their Pep fan-boy status and gone down the line of, ‘Guardiola’s bad luck in the Champions League continues’. Bad luck? It’s not bad luck. Guardiola made some woeful decisions against Real Madrid and they came back to bite him and his club.

He took off Kevin De Bruyne and surely in such circumstances it doesn’t matter if someone is having a good game, a bad game or an indifferent game, if he’s one of your best players or your best player, you keep him on the pitch until the very end of the match.

Exploitable

Guardiola’s very simple narrative of football is that the best mode of defence is attack, but he went against that and, as Real pushed, City were exploitable on the counter-attack.

His decisions allowed his team to look reactive at the end of the game and they paid a heavy price.

Let’s not pretend it’s the first time he has made mistakes in big Champions League games because it isn’t – the defeat by Monaco in the round of 16 in 2017 springing to mind as well.

The reason Guardiola hasn’t won the Champions League in the last 11 years is because he hasn’t been good enough.

And we might as well be talking 30 years in terms of how the game moves on.

What I don’t understand is why I still hear him being talked about in the same breath as Brian Clough, Jock Stein, Bob Paisley and Co when people are discussing the best 10 or 20 managers the game has ever seen.

Guardiola has only competed with three clubs and they have been the wealthiest or secondwealthiest teams in their countries.

It’s the antithesis of what Cloughie did in building a team organically at Nottingham Forest and

The reason

Guardiola hasn’t won the Champions League in the past 11 years is because he hasn t been good

enough