He passed it off as a joke, “I want to harm myself,” Pep Guardiola said in reference to the cut on his nose. It was caused by an errant finger nail drawn across his face during a moment of stress against Feyenoord. There have been plenty of them of late, the most recent on Tuesday night in the Champions League when Manchester City surrendered a three-goal lead in the final 14 minutes.
A welt of red marks on his bald pate complemented the cut as the goals went in, further signs of the anxiety, or “suffering” to use the Spanish idiom, to which Guardiola is prone in the pursuit of perfection. Never one to let good enough get in the way of excellence, perhaps Guardiola should scale down expectations in this period of unprecedented setbacks.
The five consecutive defeats, the 4-0 reverse at home to Spurs, the giving up of a three-goal lead, all career firsts for Guardiola. Suddenly he is mortal, feeling the pressure as any rank-and-file coach might. And this at the point of extending his contract at the Etihad for a further two years. Are the fates calling time on the greatest sage of the age, pairing the moment when decline set in with the choice to carry on?
Even before the run of defeats bookended by Spurs in the Carabao Cup and Premier League, there were signs something was awry with narrow victories, all by a one-goal margin, against Brentford, Fulham, Wolves and Southampton. This was a sequence that also included draws with a misfiring Arsenal and a fitful Newcastle.
Though City continued to dominate possession and strangle games with their passing, those statistics dropped against Brighton and Spurs, where they enjoyed only 61 and 58 per cent possession respectively. And instead of the routine twice as many passes completed, the numbers fell to approximately 1.5x against Brighton and 1.3x in Saturday’s coruscating defeat to Spurs.
Guardiola admitted after the historic four Premier League titles in a row last summer, that he felt his time had probably come, that he would not be extending his contract at the end of this season. The circumstances surrounding the ongoing legal battle with the Premier League over the 115 charges relating to the club’s financial conduct, all denied by the club, persuaded him otherwise. “Now is not the time to leave,” he said.
So his head was telling him he was done, but his heart over-ruled it, which tends to be the way of things when logic and emotion square up. The issue for Guardiola is summoning the force of that emotion on a daily basis the way he did. Once you decide you are done it is very difficult to become undone, no matter the sense of loyalty to the club.
The intensity, the energy, the drive to go again is simply not there to the same degree. Maybe the players, either consciously or subconsciously, have picked up on this, intuited in some way a subtle change in the environment. Their energy, like Guardiola’s, appears not what it was. That is how it looked against Feyenoord when the last goal went in, the Dutch attack leaving behind a trail of slowing City defenders, who, frankly, looked to have given up.
The same was true against Spurs and perhaps most markedly in the match at Brighton, where City not only surrendered two late goals in the space of five minutes, but ran out of mental capacity to such a degree the outcome seemed inevitable. This sense of looming capitulation, of utter defeat is new to Guardiola and to his teams. And perhaps, more importantly, to opponents who sense the weakness.
Guardiola must take his wounded champions to Anfield on Sunday in a contest that already looks season-defining with just a third of the campaign gone. Were he to lose there, even peak City might have struggled to cancel an 11-point deficit to a vibrant Liverpool benefitting from the kind of energy injection Guardiola is seemingly unable to access.
He has always been an agitated, fiercely engaged figure on the touchline, micro-processing every second of the game. But this has hitherto fed into a positive vibe that galvanised his teams. What we are seeing now at City, a mood-altering, downward spiral is new, never experienced at Barcelona or Bayern Munich.
We are all amateur psychologists here, looking for meaningful signs, for trends, patterns, dots to join. Results don’t lie. Neither do the figures behind them. City are without their beating heart, Rodri, and his replacement Mateo Kovacic. Also injured are John Stones, Jeremy Doku and Oscar Bobb. The talismanic Kevin De Bruyne is not yet at full fitness after another long absence. Likewise Ruben Dias and Jack Grealish.
The team is also ageing. Ilkay Gundogan, brought back after one season at Barcelona, looks every inch a 34-year-old chugging about the middle of the park. De Bruyne is 33, Bernado Silva 30. That spark, that moment of ignition that gave them the edge appears dulled or even absent. They run the same neat lines, but not to the same affect. The magic appears lost, as do the young lads stepping in.
Poor Jahmai Simpson-Pusey, a 19-year-old defender, was run ragged in the Brighton denouement and floundered as a substitute against Feyenoord. The protection once offered by City’s imperial dominance is now denied, and in this moment the answers appear out of Guardiola’s reach.
This is new territory. All great managers are adept at renewal. Arsene Wenger built two great title winning teams at Arsenal. Sir Alex Ferguson managed 25 years at the helm at Old Trafford, but neither burned with the same intensity as Guardiola.
He took himself to the golf course for 12 months to repair after four years managing Barcelona. He has already spent twice that in Manchester, and this after arriving straight from three years at Bayern Munich. The game consumes him in the good times. He might not be recognisable by Christmas should he continue to combust at the present rate.
The manic energy that defines him was thought to signpost his genius. In the closing stages against Feyenoord it looked like full-on distress, the kind that engulfs and destroys. That is neither healthy for him nor his team. The extra two years were thought a guarantee, extending City’s epochal success. To some observers, it feels like the end of empire.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/zCPyL09
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