Pep Guardiola showed signs of despondency and confusion when, after losing 4-2 this Wednesday, he appeared in the conference room at the Parc des Princes and said: “We couldn’t defend with the ball, and if you don’t play with the ball it’s impossible to defend well.” The psychological tension that Guardiola was experiencing was maximum, as he knew that he had just succumbed to the weapons that he himself invented more than 15 years ago without offering any solutions other than those used by his powerless adversaries against the advance of that great Barça. As against United, Juventus or Brentford in recent months, City slowed down the pace of the ball under the pretext of taking care of it, only this time they also ended up locked in their area and with barely 40% possession. With no escape other than insufficient counterattacks.
Carried away by the current of the worst crisis of his career, this Wednesday in Paris, the 53-year-old Manchester City coach observed how his team experienced a kind of regression to the first 2000s that left him unable to solve the problems that Luis Enrique posed. . The PSG coach, who prides himself on representing the Barça DNA and points out that “the best coach in the world” is his friend Guardiola, developed three basic ideas from the manual Cruyff-Guardiola on the way to a victory that practically ensures their qualification for the round of 16. First, press the man in the opposite field to stifle the rival on his way out; second, get out of the opposing pressure by overpopulating the midfield with interiors and forwards with elastic and aggressive movements; and third, protect yourself with center backs like Marquinhos and Pacho, attack dogs more than passers.
“We have to go back to the sources,” says Guardiola, since he was shaken by the crisis of results in Europe and the Premier League. “We have to be patient and be safe with the ball.” On Wednesday he reinforced that idea by emphasizing that without the ball you cannot defend well. The question that Guardiola tried to resolve in Paris was the paradox that has destroyed City since Rodri was injured and Ruben Dias suffers recurring physical problems: How to defend with the ball without first stealing it from the opponent?
Guardiola knows the answer because he recognizes that City owes its 2023 Champions League title to the strong performance of its defenders: Dias, Akanji, Aké, Walker and Stones. Due to the competitive tension and aggressiveness they transmitted, he baptized them as The Yugoslavs. But as time went by he realized that in that cast there was only one Yugoslavhis name was Ruben Dias and he had so few fleas and lived so alarmed that he was capable of putting the defenders around him into trouble by himself, just like Puyol did with Piqué and Alves at Barça. The coach knew then that his less fine defense with the ball was, however, the only essential one. After all, the great lesson that Johan Cruyff bequeathed him about his conception of defense was to discard the artistic Ricardo Serna to form a block with Nando, Ferrer, Nadal, Juan Carlos and the intuitive Koeman. If he Dream Team He defended himself with the ball, it was because when he didn’t have it he recovered it before anyone else. Exactly what Luis Enrique intended.
Unlike Guardiola, who decided to press from behind with a 4-4-2, like Rafa Benítez did two decades ago, in Paris his colleague and friend decided to accelerate on principle, without caring that in the process he might lose precision in the pass. His motto was not to have the ball, but to win it by putting constant pressure on the man, throughout the field. “After such a high-paced first half,” he said, “at half-time I told the players that we had to come out even more daring, without speculating, regardless of the result. And when they scored 0-2 against us even more so. “We went to take the ball away from them.”
City’s conservative pressure, three against four, or four against five, the same one that Guardiola designed against big rivals like United or Juventus this season, had an immediate effect on the spirit of creative players like De Bruyne, Foden or Savinho. Since the premise was to have the ball, not steal it, they were easily convinced that defense was not essential and that induced a kind of lethargy while the defensive desire placed PSG in an advantageous position to attack. “They were better with the ball because they had an extra man in the middle,” Guardiola observed.
Pressured and not pressured, City lost the “extra man”. Those footballers who move by surprise to join the plays and offer themselves to their teammates as an alternative support point in the circulation chain disappeared because the team became an agglomeration of overwhelmed midfielders waiting for someone to do something to steal from them. the ball to PSG and give it to them. That’s what Kovacic was supposed to be there for. But Kovathe one chosen by Guardiola to replace Rodri, gave up being the pivot, the person most responsible for the team’s logistics, to return to the mental state of the leading playmaker that he always dreamed of being. Seeing him, frightened, Guardiola replaced him with Gündogan. But the game was already 2-2 and without Ruben Dias, who asked for a change at half-time due to injury, the inertia was impossible to stop.
“I have not been able to”
With the Yugoslav Dias, the least technically gifted of the squad, the partial was 0-0. Without him, the drama ended 4-2. In just over half an hour, the win left the team virtually out of the Champions League. It is the tone of this City that drifts melancholic while Guardiola unsuccessfully tries to straighten the course, determined as he is to send messages that his footballers, apparently, listen to with more resignation than rebellion, since the idea that is spread is that everything is because of the absentees or the coach. “I have already spoken about the problems we have had with casualties,” he said before the game in Paris, evoking the absences of Rodri, Stones, Walker and Dias. “But it’s not an excuse. I have not been able to lift the team. That is my challenge.”
Guardiola faces the biggest challenge of his career. After launching a dynasty at Barça, another at Bayern and a third at City, his name is among the greatest team builders in history. Now the task is of a different nature. It is in uncharted territory. He must avoid decline and do so against rivals like PSG, who perfectly handle all those weapons that he, with the help of Cruyff, created since 2008.
