Pep Confidential (28 page)

‘I’M NOT SAYING MY WAY IS BETTER. IT’S JUST MY WAY.’

Munich, October 20, 2013

THERE ARE FOUR white lines painted on the grass. Pep’s four lines. They divide training pitch No.1 into five lanes, all more or less the same width. The two external lanes or corridors are formed by continuing the white line from the exterior (vertical) line of the penalty box all the way upfield to connect with the exterior line of the opposite penalty area. This leaves a big square of space between the horizontal edges of each penalty box. The two further white lines painted on the grass run from box to box, thus making the five vertical lanes of roughly similar width.

Despite the fact that it’s almost the end of October, we are sweating under a fierce Mediterranean sun. Training finished an hour ago and anyone who played in the win against Mainz 05 stuck to a simple warm-up, some
rondos
followed by a few short joint-mobility exercises to assist in post-match recuperation. This lasted all of 20 minutes for Arjen Robben, but he has also completed his own daily workout in the gym. Thirty minutes before and after training the Dutch player warms up on the exercise bike, does some stretching and injury-prevention work. He finishes off with some abdominal and other specific muscle-building exercises, followed by some proprioceptive and isometric muscle-concentration work. Robben follows this routine every day without fail. It’s an essential part of maintaining the powerful musculo-articular physique which makes him so explosive. He takes the same high-speed approach to his food, too, cutting up his steak at maximum velocity, just as if he were dribbling past an opponent and then chomping it down with similar haste. This need for speed is one of his virtues but it’s also a weakness. He has, on occasion, injured himself by attempting some tricky move at this same explosive speed, so preventative work is vital.

The rest of yesterday’s team are content just to do the standard post-match training: warm up,
rondos
, some loosening off and that’s it until Tuesday. The team is showing signs of tiredness. They’ve had a lot of ‘English weeks’ (a game every three days) plus the international break, which inevitably leaves them in a bit of a mess. Players like Lahm are absolutely done-in by the constant demands made of them, although the damage is more mental than physical. However, there is no time to rest. In three days’ time they play Viktoria Plzen in the Champions League and face Hertha in the Bundesliga three days after that. These matches are an important part of maintaining their momentum.

‘They need a break,’ says Pep. ‘But right now I can’t give them one. After the Hertha match we’ve a whole week before the next game and I’m going to give them two or three days of complete rest. I might give Lahm as many as four days. They need to go home and disconnect.’

Out on the Säbener Strasse pitch the men who were not in the line-up against Mainz or had just a few minutes that day play a game in two areas. Lorenzo Buenaventura has just sent Rafinha off to have his shower. ‘I want to play but Lorenzo won’t let me,’ smiles the Brazilian as he walks through the dressing room. ‘You’re much too important Rafa!’ the physical trainer tells him.

Götze, Kirchhoff, Alaba, Pizarro, Starke, Van Buyten and some of the youth-team players are playing. Javi Martínez has joined them as the wild card. ‘Finally, I’m feeling good. I’ve no more pain in my groin and it makes such a difference.’

Pep is slowly putting his team back together, although it seems absurd to say that considering Shaqiri’s muscle tear (six weeks out), the deep cut Dante took to his ankle against Mainz (two weeks out) and Ribéry’s ankle injury. As well as Thiago’s problems, of course.

The normal rules apply to the training match. Maximum intensity and aggression whilst the public, given access today for the Sunday session, look on in respectful silence. No matter how many times you witness it, the sight of 1000 fans, many of them children, sitting in absolute silence is actually quite unnerving for those of us with a Latin temperament, more used to shouting and cheering from the stands. However, the German supporters are happy to watch quietly for 90 minutes, no matter what happens on the pitch. All you can hear are Guardiola’s instructions, the sound of Hermann Gerland’s whistle as one exercise ends and the next starts, and the shouts of the players looking for a goal. These are the only sounds.

The fans get noisy only when Tiger Gerland blows his whistle to indicate the end of the session. Then the air is filled with frenzied shouts as the supporters clamour for their idols’ autographs. This is another house rule: look after the public. No matter how tired the players are, they’ll head over to the youngest supporters. It makes the fans’ day and it’s no surprise that quite a few of the players take a full 30 minutes to get to the showers. Today it will be Alaba and Javi Martínez’s turn to share a little stardust with the hundreds of kids there. They then give everyone a thrill by jumping aboard the kitman’s buggy (normally used to transport water bottles and isotonic drinks) and racing it up and down the pitch.

At midday Dante comes out of the medical room using crutches to keep one foot off the ground. Thiago has just completed another recuperation session and is obviously delighted to be working on the eliptical trainer. He also does some running on the Alter-G, an anti-gravity treadmill, which will help him regain mobility in his injured ankle. Thiago loves it. ‘This machine is a real luxury. You start very gently, it’s like you’re running in lower gravity and the machine is calibrated so that it counters your body weight and you don’t do damage to the ankle.’

Thiago is furious about the wasted months and all the missed opportunities. The team has reached cruising speed and he is still not yet on board. ‘I’ll be back soon. Real soon,’ he insists, although we know that he has another long month ahead of him.

Javi Martínez, on the other hand, does see light at the end of his particular tunnel and next Saturday he’s likely to get his first minutes in a league game. Pep’s face lights up when he talks about first getting Javi back and then Götze, Schweinsteiger and Thiago: ‘It has been a very tough start and there have been times when I’ve thought that we couldn’t move forward because the whole structure in the middle of the pitch had broken down.’

Toni Kroos is the only true midfield player who has made it through from the start of the year. For one reason or another, Javi, Thiago, Schweinsteiger and Götze, over and above the positions Pep had in mind for each of them, have not been able to contribute much during these three-and-half months and he has had to patch up his midfield time and again. It looks like the dark times are at an end – just as problems start to appear in defence.

With Dante injured and Boateng banned, Bayern will have to play their next Champions League game, against Viktoria Plzen, with the veteran Van Buyten and Diego Contento partnered at the back. There is nothing else for it. Javi won’t be fit in time and Kirchhoff has already shown time and again that defensive power is not his forte. Contento will be the other centre-half.

It has been such a lovely Sunday that we are treated to one of those moments when Guardiola relaxes enough to break with the etiquette of a working day and open up a bit. It all starts with Matthias Sammer, who turns up full of cheeky grins and starts a bit of leg pulling: ‘Do me a favour. Go on YouTube and type in ‘Guardiola goals’. You’ll never guess what comes back! 404 not found!’

The joke’s on Pep, but he roars with laughter as the sports director guffaws his way through a 10-minute anecdote about the coach’s woeful goal-scoring record (in almost 400 matches with Barça, he managed 13 goals).

‘Zero. A complete blank. Zero. Just look on YouTube and you’ll see it keeps giving you an error message.’

Pep responds by addressing him as
Torpedo
Sammer, an allusion to
der Bomber der Nation
, Gerd Müller. This leads to general hilarity amongst the entire technical team and Pep relaxes and starts to talk.

‘These guys are beasts. Their acceleration is super human. They all have this German talent for the sensational comeback. It’s the spirit of Beckenbauer and the rest. I feel like I can achieve anything with these men. You could be in a Champions League semi-final two goals behind and these players would do it. It doesn’t matter what it is, they can do it. They have such a special spirit.’

I ask if he had to give his men a bit of a tongue lashing yesterday at half-time when Mainz 05 were winning 1-0. After the break, goals from Robben, Müller (two) and Mandžukić turned the game around, so that Bayern came away with a win which put them at the top of the league by a single point. It is assistant coach Domènec Torrent who answers.

‘Never. When things are going badly we’d never give them a hard time. We only do that when things are going well because that’s when it can be useful. In the difficult moments all we do is change positions and adjust details. We’d never start telling them off. If the game’s going badly you only earn credibility by correcting what they’re doing rather than shouting about it.’

Pep is pleased with yesterday’s comeback. Instead of shouting the odds, all he did was change part of the tactical framework, putting them in a 4-2-1-3, with Mario Götze in the No.10 position behind Mandžukić. This simple alteration played havoc with super-organised Mainz, coached by the excellent Thomas Tuchel, currently one of the most promising German coaches. ‘The time we really struggled was against Wolfsburg. They were defending like champions and I really worried that we wouldn’t get a win that day,’ adds Pep. He then goes on to point out the strengths and weaknesses of his team. ‘We’ve managed to staunch the blood-letting caused by counter-attacks. German teams are capable of executing a successful counter-attack in three seconds flat. We started out badly because Alaba wasn’t moving forward to press his winger. He was moving back too quickly and gifting them too much space. But he managed to correct it very quickly.’

In contrast, bringing the ball out, avoiding the dull U-movement of the ball remains a work in progress. ‘We aren’t aggressive in how we do it. If the opponent holds off, you have to go after him, to create division in their lines.’

To make a notable difference in this Pep opts to have Lahm drop back in between the two centre-halves in order to gain the powerful, daring playing out from the back which is modelled on that of the Argentinian coach Ricardo La Volpe.

‘Playing out with three men from the back is very useful because it conditions the response of your rival. Even if they press you, it’ll be with the centre-forward and second striker, obliging them to move into a 4-4-2 shape and you can therefore over-run them by achieving superiority.’

Pep’s vision of the game means that he looks for superiority in every area of the pitch. But he explains that tactical ideas are tools for the team to use, not the reverse.

‘That’s always the case. The players are the important people and you have to adapt the tactics to them. Look at my last year with Barça. We changed everything and started using a 3-4-3 system so that we could accommodate Cesc Fàbregas. And that was one hell of an era, with Messi and Cesc playing like a double No.10, with all the repertoire of skills they bring, hunting around the opposition penalty box whenever they smelled blood,’ he explains.

Pep is also delighted with Arjen Robben’s performance every time he puts the Dutchman on the left side of the attack. ‘Maybe it’s a coincidence but every time you put him on the left he scores a goal.’ He’s now thinking about using Robben in all areas of the attack.

Matthias Sammer has to leave, but before he does he grabs my arm and says quietly: ‘It’s not just that he’s a genius, which he is. It’s not just that he’s a born winner, which he is. It’s that, above all else, Pep is a great guy with a big heart. He’s a lovely person.’

With Sammer gone the language of choice now switches to Catalan. There’s Pep, Domènec Torrent and Cadiz-born Lorenzo Buenaventura, who understands Catalan perfectly. Manel Estiarte, Carles Planchart and Miquel Soler (
Nanu
Soler holds the record for having played in the most Spanish first division teams: Espanyol, Barcelona, Atlético de Madrid, Sevilla, Real Madrid, Zaragoza and Mallorca – seven in total) are all still here, too.

‘Pep, do you remember what I told you about crossing to the front post?’ asks Soler.

‘Yes, of course, we’ve been working on it. A cross from the side which fizzes in towards the near post is like a half-scored goal. If the striker running in to it doesn’t score then there’s a good chance the defender will put it in his own net. It’s why you always need to try to clear a front-post cross before it reaches the front post. I said that to Contento today: “Always clear it before it reaches the goalmouth.”’

After the diatribe he gets back to a perennial preoccupation – counter-attacks. ‘They are very good, these German teams. When they leave free players high up the pitch they’re excellent. I’m going to have to talk with Svetislav Pesic [Bayern’s basketball coach] so he can explain to me why in basketball it’s not feasible to defend with 4 v 5 and leave a free guy up the court. This fascinates me.’

Guardiola has kicked off his football boots but stands on the grass chatting as though this were an extended part of training. He gesticulates, jumps about and acts out the moves he refers to. ‘I worry about giving my players too many tactical concepts. It just struck me one day. They were starting to collapse under the weight of it all, so I decided to be a bit more selective about what I share.’

He then contradicts himself as he leads us over to the four white lines on Pitch No.1 and launches into a formidable monologue, which lasts 20 long minutes and is impossible to reproduce here. He details exactly what each of his men do, going through the squad player by player. He moves across the pitch, through each of the demarcated lanes, crossing the dividing lines as he delivers his master class. He’s a whirlwind of movement and gestures and much of what he says is just too difficult to follow without losing the thread of his whole explanation.