Pep Guardiola looks like a broken man in need of a break
They say you learn more in defeat. âTheyâ have clearly never stood where Pep Guardiola is standing now.
Defeat teaches you about as much as a punch in the face. It hurts and haunts you, it climbs into bed with you and keeps you awake. It turns you against the world, then it turns you against yourself. It infects your reason and your judgment.
Guardiolaâs champion team have suffered defeat in half the games theyâve played since the end of November. They donât want to attend any more lessons, thank you very much. They need a crash course in how to win again; itâs the only known cure for losing.
Pep looks like he needs a break, maybe needs a golf course. Golfers are accustomed to defeat as most professional players âloseâ every week. Success might be making a cut, picking up a cheque. Itâs like driving for Kick Sauber in a Grand Prix or riding the rank outsider in the National. Youâre happy just to make it round.
Football is not like that. Itâs a never-ending bill of prize fights. When the final bell rings, somebodyâs strong hand is raised in triumph and the other guyâs heart is broken. Even in the VAR age, the result is final and brutal. And each defeat seems to push the next win further from your reach.
There are ways to lose. Guardiola was big enough to acknowledge that Real Madrid were and are better than Manchester City right now. And they are not the only ones that are. Heâs getting a little too much practice at being fair and gracious in defeat. Him, just him.
Nobody likes a bad loser but nobody likes being a good loser either.
You can sign up for Cliveâs Substack here. You wonât regret it.
Donald Trump has taken âbad losingâ to a new level just lately. How Pep must wish he could simply sign a few executive orders. Cole Palmer and Julian Alvarez would be back at the club in the morning, Liverpool immediately relegated into Greenlandâs 3rd Division and the Premier League disbanded altogether. Make City great again.
The real problem for Guardiola is that City were great just a few months ago. Itâs the sudden loss of altitude that has created the cabin pressure thatâs scratched the marks on his troubled face. We have all got our theories about how it has happened but none of us truly saw it coming. And heâs taking it upon himself to come up with theories that practically halt the tail-spin theyâre in. If he can.
Him. Just him. In full view of the biggest lens in the televisual armoury, heâs there with one finger in the dam and another mapping out the next solution on a tactics board. He doesnât kick a ball and yet he kicks every ball. All that praise heaped upon him is now sitting like a mountaineerâs rucksack on his shoulders. Itâs a special feeling to reach any summit but the descent is often the most dangerous part of a climb.
Martin Brundle once told me that racing drivers feel indestructible until the first crash that hurts them. They walk away from any number of spins and shunts without the resulting whiplash shaving even one hundredth of a second off their next lap time. Then they hit a wall that doesnât budge. Then they start to reach for the brake pedal a little more readily. Then itâs time to look for a seat in a studio or a commentary box.
Guardiola has never struck me as being arrogant enough to believe heâs bullet-proof but he has always backed himself to coach football teams in his own individual way. Every innovator has to walk the border line between creative genius and mad professor and Pepâs record and standing in the game tell you heâs stayed on the right side of that boundary more often than not. But the wrong side is never far away.
With single-minded conviction comes the awful, heavy pain of living with the consequences if your beliefs turn out to be mere myths and fables. Itâs that Christmas morning you realise there really is no Santa Claus.
A tactical surprise or five has long been a mercurial part of the Guardiola DNA. Injuries dictated some of his selections for the two Real Madrid games but Abdukodir Khusanov had never started a senior game at right-back before squaring up to Vinicius Junior in the Bernabeu. Deploying John Stones as a conventional midfield player has always been an experiment waiting to happen but City can only have had a session or two to work on the idea before the first leg. It was the defeats, more than the injuries, that forced him to improvise.
Pep is a meticulous strategist, a spectrum planner. Heâs not given to following hunches or having a flutter. Gamblers donât handle their losses very well. They have a tendency to turn in on their lives and hide the churning grief. Guardiola is taking a very personal and public responsibility for everything thatâs happening on his watch. The November contract is evidence of that. He wants to put this right. Him, just him.
Success doesnât inoculate you against failure. Quite the opposite. It just makes the latter more difficult to accept and process when it finally arrives. Two of the most competitive football people I know drew their deepest motivation from a fear of defeat. Graeme Souness and Roy Keane hated losing matches too much to ever countenance losing many. They recognised how badly they took defeat and didnât want themselves or anyone close to them to live with the fall-out very often.
Losing taught them only that they didnât want any part of it. They would do anything to anybody to avoid it. I suspect that Guardiola is from much the same species.
There were still 10 minutes remaining of the first half when I asked my co-commentator Rob Green at what point City looked to minimise the damage in Madrid. At what point this serial winning machine accepted the outcome and looked to limit the fall-out from their impending Champions League exit. How difficult must defeat be to take when itâs written large in front of your eyes even before you give a half-time talk to your dressing-room full of medal winners?
In 16 seasons as a coach, Pep Guardiola has never failed to reach the last 16 of the Champions League until now. Think about that and think about how mortally wounded this proud and successful man must feel today. No quick fixes in sight and bloody Liverpool on Sunday. Pep canât hand in a sick note on the morning of the game. Not him.
He will spend the intervening hours mulling over videos and encouraging Nico Gonzalez to get on the ball and pass forward and talking to Omar Marmoush and Savinho about finding a fresh attacking blend. Losing at the Bernabeu will have afforded him insights into what his latest acquisitions have to offer but nothing that his football imagination and intellect hadnât hit upon already.
The biggest and maybe only lesson from Manchester Cityâs 13th defeat of the season is that defeat sucks.
You can sign up for Cliveâs Substack here. You wonât regret it.
