Pep Confidential (12 page)

Let’s go back to Trentino. On the morning of July 8, Mario Gómez bids a brief but elegant farewell to his team-mates after breakfast. It has been a month since Matthias Sammer, the sports director, told him that Bayern wanted to transfer him. Gómez, who had lost his place to Mandžukić, on goal difference, accepts. ‘I love Bayern and I will always belong to Bayern,’ the player tells his team-mates today. And he packs his bags.

Many kilometres away from Lake Garda, Thiago is also keen to start packing. He has made his deal with Bayern and all that remains is for Rummenigge to call Sandro Rosell, the Barcelona president. Thiago has had three weeks’ holiday and has just started to train by himself. He is nervous about some last-minute detail unravelling the whole deal. The other thing that worries him is that there are only three weeks to go before the German Super Cup final against Borussia Dortmund, and he is desperate not to miss it.

12

‘THEY’LL CLIMB THAT MOUNTAIN 10 TIMES IN A ROW.’

Arco, July 9 2013

GUARDIOLA HAS NEVER considered himself a creative genius, an inventor. Instead he has defined himself as an ‘ideas thief’, someone who, as a footballer, experimented but most of all learned, and when he decided to be a coach kept on learning. When he reached the top as a coach, he still felt he had more to learn, so he studied the strategies of the best. ‘Ideas belong to everyone and I have stolen as many as I could.’

His influences include all the ones you might expect. First and foremost, Cruyff, his coach at Barcelona and his mentor. But also Arrigo Sacchi, whose Milan team won back-to-back European Cups. He was influenced by contrasting footballing visions, such as those of César Luis Menotti, Argentina’s World Cup-winning coach in 1978, and Sacchi’s heir at Milan, Fabio Capello. The Dutch, the Italians, the fierce competitiveness of the Argentinians, the innovation of the Hungarians, the hunger for centre-pitch dominance of Barça, the perfectionism of Marcelo Bielsa, the analytical clarity of the Spanish coach Juanma Lillo (more or less unknown at the top level) and the passion of the Scots.

If he is a football revolutionary it is thanks to the way he deconstructs ideas. The false 9 position he used with Messi is a good example. As a player, Pep was a team-mate of Michael Laudrup in Cruyff’s Dream Team. Laudrup was an immense false 9. This team, which won four consecutive Spanish leagues and gave Barça their first European Cup, played for a long time without a centre-forward. Cruyff left the centre-forward’s zone empty and used Laudrup as a ‘man without a zone’. The rival defenders would get all tangled up, not knowing what to do with him. Before they knew it, Laudrup would be long gone from the penalty box, having left the way clear for his team-mates to arrive suddenly and put the ball away. Guardiola was both witness and protagonist during this era. Later, he continued to study the evolution of the false 9 position in the work of Adolfo Pedernera in the 1930s and 40s, Nándor Hidegkuti and Péter Palotás of the great Hungary side of the 1950s, the legendary Alfredo Di Stéfano, Laudrup and Francesco Totti, the modern-day Roman icon.

He extracted the essentials from everything he’d learned and then broke down and reconstructed the position for Messi.

What is the true essence of the false 9? Leaving a normally occupied zone empty. Teams put a centre-forward in the main part of the penalty area, bang in the middle, the area where, if you strike the ball you’re more than halfway to scoring. It was about clearing space in the central part of the most attacking zone on the pitch. Pep saw that Messi possessed the tactical ability to understand it. He wanted to give the best area of the pitch, the centre-forward’s space, to his best player. But he planned to do it by leaving it free, unoccupied. The area would be his, he told Messi, but only on condition that he didn’t use it except to finish a chance. He needed to get into the zone for the final shot, but he shouldn’t stay there. And of course, we all know how well his ideas turned out.

It was exactly this type of creativity he was looking for with Franck Ribéry and Arjen Robben in telling them to limit their runs to a maximum of 40 metres. It meant eliminating the deficiencies of a movement and reconstructing it using different principles, whilst still maintaining its core purpose. He still wanted a penetrating attack down the wing, quick and direct, but it would be more brief, more intense and starting from a greater point of advantage. However, first he’d have to ensure that the team were moving as a group toward the middle of the pitch.

‘We’d like Ribéry not to drop back any further than the centre line,’ confirms Manel Estiarte on the morning of July 9.

The Bayern players are training hard despite the fact that they are due to play Brescia in a fairly important friendly this evening.

‘Ribéry is totally committed to Pep’s cause. Maybe there are things that he would prefer to do differently, but he puts 100% into everything. He’s a terrific guy, who has taken on board all the strengths of the German game. His will and energy are absolutely limitless. We want to harness that energy. We don’t want him running 80 metres across the pitch 20 times a match. We need him concentrating his efforts on shorter bursts which will actually be more productive.’

The morning training session is brutally intense, as all of this season’s training will be. Its purpose is to train the team in defensive organisation, correcting them where necessary. Pep is passionate about improving the team’s defensive skills. This is one of his main characteristics. Guardiola is no romantic idealist when it comes to football, nor is he an aesthete, as has been claimed. He is a single-minded pragmatist. Above all else, Pep wants to win.

If he’s working so hard on the defensive organisation, it is because he wants to attack. One day in Säbener Strasse, I said to him: ‘You work on defensive strategy most.’

His response was short: ‘Because it’s absolutely essential if I want to attack a lot. Defensive organisation is the cornerstone of everything else I want to achieve in my football.’

Throughout the season there will be dozens of sessions like the one he has just finished in the Arco Stadium, during which the team has practised facing crosses from full-backs and defending against corners. They have also covered how to cope with the long ball down the middle to the penalty box and how to defend when the opponent attacks in greater numbers.

His players have trained well and Estiarte is delighted. ‘They work like Trojans and their attitude is just outstanding. They’re ready to learn and are willing to have a go at anything we ask. If we asked them to climb that mountain [he is looking out to Arco Castle], they would climb it 10 times in a row.’

Guardiola, as always, is more circumspect: ‘It won’t be easy. At the start we’re going to find it hard because we’re going to have to play with great intensity whilst, at the same time, thinking about the new concepts, and it isn’t easy to play and think simultaneously. It’s pretty difficult to spend 90 minutes concentrating and playing well, whilst thinking about the moves you have to make or where you have to be.’

The coach warns that there are difficulties on the horizon, now that everyone is predicting a happy and straightforward future for the team: ‘It won’t be easy,’ he insists. ‘They are finding it difficult to assimilate some concepts because they have always defended man-to-man in all areas of the pitch, but now I am changing it so that they leave no gaps or positions uncovered.’

He is also missing a bit of nous in the centre of the pitch. He has Toni Kroos, an astonishing talent who moves the ball precisely and sharply, but Pep wants him to increase his control of possession. This is why he is so desperate for Thiago to arrive, although he has not yet fully realised the important role Philipp Lahm will play in this area of Bayern’s game.

‘The physical side we already have down, and the pressing too. It comes as standard with these players. I have to add a few tactical touches without letting them lose this level of pressing or the fitness they have achieved. They just lack that little bit of ‘pause’ in the play. Iniesta is a good example of that. At Barça he had it. He took the ball and it suddenly seemed as if time stood still and there was order all around him. Here, right now, we don’t have that … yet.’

When Thiago arrives the coach reckons he’ll have 16 ‘starter’ players – the precise figure he likes to manage in his teams. Pep doesn’t like to have more than 20 players in his squad if he can help it. It helps him manage them without tensions getting in the way. He hates that moment when he has to tell two or three guys, in the hours leading up to a match, that they’ll be sitting in the stands and won’t even make the bench. For that reason he likes a small group, within which about 15 or 16 of them can feel like they are, or should be, starting players. This is a real ‘Pep’ characteristic, which doesn’t necessarily mean it is a virtue.

During his four years with Barça he often had to patch things up in order to make his small-squad idea function properly. Of course the majority of the time things worked out, like when he won two Champions League finals with improvised back fours. But a lot of patching up had been done for those two games nonetheless.

Both Pep and his backroom staff firmly defend this idea. All of them reckon that agreeing to a larger squad, say 25 players of similar ability, wouldn’t necessarily avoid some patching up during the season. In any case, virtue or defect, this is what makes Guardiola comfortable.

Right now, he’s pondering the subject. ‘I’ve no idea what I’m going to do when all the players from the Confederations Cup come back [Javi Martínez, Dante, Luiz Gustavo]. Plus there’s Götze and Schweini too…’

Negotiations to sell Luiz Gustavo are already in place, but even so Pep is still going over and over the possible player combinations in his ideal Bayern team. On paper there just isn’t room for all the players in his squad. However, reality is just about to bite and rid him of these particular preoccupations. When the injuries hit, Pep’s problem won’t be how to use all his players but how to piece together a competitive team. Not once in the whole of 2013 will all his first-team players be fit or available at the same time. It’s the downside of managing a ‘short’ squad.

At the end of this training session a single image attracts the attention of Pep and his staff. Ribéry and Robben are knocking the ball back and forwards, away from everyone else, as if they’re hanging out on the beach. Someone mentions that only a few months ago, in spring 2012, they came to blows in the Allianz Arena during the Bayern-Real Madrid Champions League semi-final. Now they are laughing and joking on the Trentino pitch.

Guardiola and Estiarte get involved in a debate about the best moments of Barcelona’s recent golden era. For Estiarte the absolute peaks were: ‘The first half against Arsenal at the Emirates [March 31, 2010. 2-2] and the first half against Chelsea in the Champions League semi-final of 2012. We never played better than those two days.’

Guardiola disagrees. ‘The performance against Chelsea was fabulous but I think we played better in the final of the World Club Cup against Santos. That was our all-time peak.’

Later that afternoon the Bayern players appear to have lead in their boots as they take on Brescia from Italy’s Serie B. The morning session, coming on top of all the training they’ve done up till now, has robbed them of their fluidity.

Pep picks his best XI from his current squad; Neuer; Lahm, Van Buyten, Boateng, Alaba; Højbjerg, Müller, Kroos; Shaqiri, Mandžukić and Ribéry.

The pre-match team talk is short and to the point but it sets the tone for the next few months. He wants them to use nous when they play the ball up to the middle of the pitch and tells them that they must get there in a tight group. From the moment they’re on the pitch they must represent the traditional Bayern play: vertical and direct. Be shrewd up to the middle of the pitch – and then all-out attack.

In the event they won’t manage to comply with his instructions. During the first half Pep will keep issuing orders. Boateng should hold the defensive line better; Kroos should impose the tempo of play more firmly; Shaqiri should widen the pitch right out to the touchline and use his runs to add depth. Against a tough but not excessively dangerous opponent, Bayern win 3-0 (with goals from Müller, Kroos and Kirchhoff) but Guardiola will be far from satisfied and will end the game even clearer about all the work he’ll have to do if they are to realise his aspirations.

That same night Mario Götze will go back to Munich. Up till now he’s been doing only bicycle work in the gym but the moment has come to advance his recuperation. His return to match fitness, however, still seems far off.

13

‘I TOLD ROSELL I WOULD BE GOING 6000
KM
AWAY FROM HIM.’

Munich, July 25, 2013

PEP STILL HAD some doubts as he left Trentino for Germany. Pierre-Emile Højbjerg was ready to play as a midfielder in the German Super Cup final in Dortmund although it would be an enormous risk. But what alternative did he have?

After spending nine days in Italy Pep now knew that he could not count on Schweinsteiger, Götze, Javi Martínez, Dante or Luiz Gustavo and would have to go up against their great rivals with the players who had been training morning and evening in the shadow of Arco Castle – unless Thiago got here in time.

He had dedicated more time to Højbjerg than to anyone else, showing him the right way to position his body when he received the ball so that he could move it on immediately as effectively as possible. He had taught the player how to place himself in between his two central defenders in order to re-start a move. He had encouraged him to be bold in his penetration of the opposition lines, either with the ball at his feet or with a long, low pass. He had given the player hours and hours of almost non-stop obsessional attention, at times apparently oblivious to time and place.

Pep felt like Cruyff would have when he was teaching the young Guardiola how to be Barcelona’s No.4 and he set out to take Højbjerg through the entire manual relating to the position of the organising midfielder. However, he wasn’t sure that it would be reasonable to put the lad to the test in these circumstances. Dropping him into Westfalen Stadion without a parachute. Facing a strong Borussia Dortmund desperate to have revenge for their defeat in the Champions League final wasn’t exactly the best time to use a kid of 17 who clearly had an exciting future ahead of him. He would be too exposed and the whole experience could end up having terrible consequences for that promising future.