Pep Confidential (40 page)

The entire squad attended the game in Berlin’s Olympiastadion, although Badstuber and Contento, who were still injured, travelled on the day of the match with Javi Martínez, who had momentarily lost his memory three days before, during the Mainz tie, after taking a kick to his head.

Bayern won 3-1, and in doing so became the first team to win the Bundesliga in March, and had won the league title earlier in the season than any other team in the history of any of the great European football championships. After 27 games they had accumulated 25 wins and two draws, with 79 goals scored and only 13 conceded. Their record-breaking league campaign had produced an average of almost three goals per game (2.92) as well as an unprecedented defensive record (0.48 goals per match conceded).

The dressing-room celebrations ended up with everyone in the swimming pool. Earlier in the evening Hermann Gerland, normally a serious man of few words, told Guardiola: ‘Pep, you are a genius.’

By midnight, Estiarte was sporting a couple of stitches in his lip after Ribéry elbowed him accidentally as the team dragged him into the swimming pool. The team then moved on to the official party, where the festivities really took off. In actual fact, the club had had nothing to do with this part of the evening, which had been masterminded by Schweinsteiger, the squad’s self-appointed party planner. Just eight days previously Schweini had thrown a fancy-dress party for his team-mates and their partners and tonight he was playing host in Berlin’s Kitty Cheng Bar, in the Mitte district.

At 2am, Pep Guardiola stepped on to the dance floor, a novel spectacle for even his closest friends, who were more used to seeing him sitting surrounded by friends and colleagues chatting about a million and one things, most of them related to football. In Marrakech after winning the Club World Cup, for example, he had celebrated by having a quiet chat with his mates Sala i Martín and David Trueba. In fairness, almost nobody had been interested in dancing that night – just Cristina, Pep’s wife and Maria, his eldest daughter, as well as Cristina’s mum and Sala i Martín’s wife. Eventually Dante and Rafinha, the fun-loving Brazilians had, rather shyly, joined the throng.

But in Berlin things were to take a very different turn. David Alaba took charge of the music, acting both as DJ and lead vocalist. The sheer exuberance of his players proved so infectious that for the first time in his coaching life Guardiola decided to get up and dance with them. Just for tonight he was one of the lads, having a few drinks and really letting his hair down. Sometime during the night, Ribéry grabbed him round the neck and announced: ‘I love you Pep. You are in my heart, man. I’m just a street kid but you will always be in my heart. Never in my life did I think I could learn as much as I have this year.’

The festivities continued well into the early hours, with Pep calling it a night just before 5am whilst several of his players made it all the way through to breakfast time. On the flight home to Munich everyone was showing the effects, and the captains repeatedly begged Pep to cancel the following day’s training so that they could sleep it off. In the end, the coach gave in. Their brilliant league campaign and ultimate triumph had earned them a rest.

I was keen to observe the team in their first training session after this triumph. The day after a great victory can be hugely illuminating. Would they be complacent after winning? Would they see this victory as a catalyst for future triumphs or the end of a chapter?

In the event the players were still in high spirits, particularly Schweinsteiger, who turned up at training wearing the face mask belonging to local ski champion Felix Neureuther. However, the hilarity ceased the second Pep appeared and started the warm-up. His players instantly switched into work mode as he divided them into three groups of seven for four five-minute games of ‘double area’ plus nine speed drills centred on quick reactions and six drills for explosive speed.

Not once did they slow down or relax and, at one point, Pep came over to me to say, delightedly: ‘Ribéry’s having his best session of the year. The guy’s a beast. An absolute beast.’

So I had the evidence of the first training session after a major victory and it was clear that this was a team still hungry for success. A team in which every single player was fighting hard for his place in the starting line-up. There were more momentous Champions League fixtures to contest and nobody wanted to be left on the bench. At this stage no one could have imagined the thrashing they were about to suffer at Real Madrid’s hands.

With the league in the bag and the Champions League looming on the horizon, it felt like a good time to sit down with Pep.

‘Our worst 10 minutes this season were in the Emirates. Manu’s [Neuer] hand saved us that day,’ he reflected. ‘Our best? Probably the game against City in Manchester or the first 40 minutes of the Hertha match in Berlin.’

I mention all the records they have broken. ‘To hell with breaking records! I just hope we can get our minds off breaking records. It really doesn’t matter from now on if we win or lose, if we concede goals or not. We’re thinking about the Champions League and the DFB-Pokal now. The league is done as far as we’re concerned.’

With only four days before their quarter-final tie with Manchester United, Pep was clear about the size of the challenge. ‘Look, even if a team appears weaker than us, they could still do us damage in the Champions League. Be in no doubt, United will put us under pressure.

‘We’ll need to attack with our full-backs high and wide because theirs close in tight to their centre-backs, and we’ll also have to be very careful of their counter-attacks via Rooney around the edge of the box and the wide pace of Valencia and Young. They don’t mind putting the ball long and I want to have our best players in the middle of the pitch in order to have and hold the ball and dominate the midfield. But, watch out – you say OLD TRAFFORD in capital letters. Mr Ferguson will be there watching and that carries a certain weight.’

Bayern were going into the quarter-final as clear favourites, but Pep was sticking to his position. ‘I know all that,’ he told me, ‘but where is it written that Bayern are a guaranteed semi-finalist, man? The only thing I know for sure is that we have two Champions League games ahead of us and we have to win them on the pitch. That’s what I’ll be telling them in the pre-match talk in Manchester – we have two games to play and we have to win them if we want to play the two after that.’

As he speaks, he remembers something and scribbles a reminder in his notebook: ‘I’ve got to speak to Boateng because the other day against Mainz he made a miracle tackle to stop the striker getting away from him, but it was almost a red-card intervention. If he had mistimed it by a second then he’d have been off. If something like that happens in the Champions League I’d rather we let the opponents score than be left with 10 men.’

I decide to take advantage of this moment of relaxed reflection to ask Guardiola for his assessment of the team’s progress.

‘They’ve come on in leaps and bounds in positional play. At the beginning they struggled with it because it’s a tough thing to master and they had to start from scratch, but they’ve done brilliantly and are total experts now. Nowadays I never need to tell them when to press or when to hold their position.’

Although the positional play drills, like the
rondos
, are fundamental elements of Pep’s work, they are nonetheless just a part of his methodology. ‘There’s still a lot to work on and we’ll start on that next season. I have taught enough for this season and we just need to apply it in competition. Next season we’ll cover more concepts. We might even lose more matches but our overall game will improve. The players will have one year of this new language behind them and they will be much more solid from the outset. We’ll try out a wider variety of approaches: one day we’ll play with three defenders, the next with the wingers pegged to the touchlines and we’ll really circulate the ball in the middle of the pitch via the No.10 and the attacking midfielders. Overall I think we’ll grow next season.’

He talks about the ball as the key to everything. ‘In football, it’s the ball that gives you speed, your passing. In basketball if you are dribbling the ball all the time, the defence has an easier time of it. But if instead you pass it rapidly from one player to another you create huge problems for your opponents. It’s exactly the same in football: to you, back to me,
tac-tac
and you get the other guy chasing his tail, even if it doesn’t seem like you’re doing very much at all. That’s why I’m committed to making sure that we pass the ball so often, so quickly in the opponents’ half. I want my two strikers to occupy the four rival defenders. Better still, I’d like to achieve that with only one striker even though he’d have to be absolutely expert to achieve it, leaving the rest of the attacking players to move the ball, to create openings in the middle of the pitch. Pass and pass – not simply to retain the ball but to kill the opponent. Moving the ball like that gives us order and leaves the rival in disarray. Coaches like Juanma Lillo [the itinerant Spanish coach who is a mentor to Pep] and Raúl Caneda [who worked closely with Lillo in Mexico and Spain] have always said this. It may not seem like much, but rapid-fire passing not only maintains your own organisation, but it also really messes up the other team.’

However, none of this is possible if your players don’t trust the system. ‘
Eccolo qua
! [a favourite Italian expression of Pep’s – ‘that’s exactly it’]. That’s the key question. How do you seduce your players into listening to you and accepting new concepts? And I mean ‘seduce’ not ‘motivate’. What happened at Barça was not that I failed to motivate them – they are wonderful footballers and marvellous people. No, I failed to seduce them! I had introduced a million tiny tactical innovations over the four years and the next step wasn’t going to be easy. You look into your players’ eyes and it’s a bit like looking at a lover. Either you see passion and a willingness to be seduced or you watch as the passion ebbs away. The same thing will happen here at Bayern. After a few years I’ll no longer know how to seduce my players and that will be the time to leave. It’s all in the eyes. It’s all about seduction.’

PART FIVE

FALLING DOWN AND GETTING BACK UP AGAIN

‘You can’t measure success if you have never failed.’
STEFFI GRAF

54

‘IT HURTS – IT MAKES YOU FEEL LIKE YOUR SKIN IS BURNING.’

Munich, March 29, 2014

IF MARCH WAS magical for Bayern, April is a tragic month. With the league in the bag, Pep makes copious changes against Hoffenheim. Thiago needs to play because over the last two weeks he has played very little, due to a badly bruised leg. He urgently needs to recover the sharpness which made him the fulcrum of the team from January onwards. Thus, he’s a starter in the Allianz because Pep wants him also to be in the line-up for the game in Manchester, against United, a few days later. But 10 minutes into the game he tears his ligaments. The referee blows for a foul and as play unwinds Thiago just relaxes his right leg in a challenge with Kevin Volland. A grave error. His leg turns 180 degrees and produces an 80% tear in the medial collateral ligament.

The previous day Pep had turned down two offers. The first was the chance to buy a very well-known central defender, but the Catalan was unconvinced of his tactical rigour and so rejected the idea. The second was the offer of a blank cheque for his salary if he’d move and take over at another European giant at the end of the season. Naturally, he said no to that, too.

This was the day he chose to close the file on a league well won. ‘I’m very content to have won this title already,’ he announced. ‘Out of professional respect for the Bundesliga we’ll keep fighting hard in every game, but on Tuesday we’ve a ‘final’ in Manchester. Yes it’s only called a quarter-final but it really is a final because we’ve only got three more guaranteed competitive games – these two against United and the DFB-Pokal semi-final against Kaiserslautern. Setting records doesn’t matter to me now, only winning these three games.’

With these words Pep hoped to close one chapter and open another – with the objective of the Bundesliga complete, he wanted total focus on winning the DFB-Pokal and the Champions League. He didn’t want the minds of his players on peripheral things like setting records.

This very idea ended up provoking a substantial dropping away in his players’ general performance. It was the seed for what flowered into a disastrous ‘de-mob happy’ atmosphere.

Hoffenheim play a high pressing game and it hurts a Bayern team full of subs: Starke, Van Buyten, Contento, Pizarro, Shaqiri. In previous weeks teams like Nuremberg, Mainz and Wolfsburg had applied identical pressure on the Bayern defenders, high up the pitch, with the idea of pinning them back as they played out from the back, but Pep’s team had won all those matches. Still, winning couldn’t hide the fact that some German coaches – like Markus Weinzierl of Augsburg, Mainz 05’s Thomas Tuchel and Wolfsburg’s Dieter Hecking – had begun to find solutions to Guardiola’s strategy and were finding out that pressing high, if done well, was a very interesting antidote to Bayern’s playing style.

Hoffenheim press so much that Bayern have to change their game plan and play on the counter-attack – something which is just about as shocking as the final result, a 3-3 draw. For the first and only time in this Bundesliga season, Bayern’s opponents have more shots on goal – 20 against 11 from Pep’s team. It’s an uncomfortable experience for the home team, whose run of 19 straight wins since October comes to an end. It is the first home draw in the league for 15 long months and the first time in two years that Bayern have conceded three goals in a Bundesliga match. Thiago is injured on 21 minutes and just as Pep’s plans for Manchester are thrown into disarray, the battalions of his fortress are also beginning to crack. Thiago is the crucial man. Not just for the quality of his passing but for the way in which he holds together and brings more out of all the other players in the middle of the pitch. He is a magnet. Pep admits that it is possible that Thiago’s absence might make all the difference to their chances of winning the Champions League. During the players’ dinner Lorenzo Buenaventura finds a Twitter picture of the moment at which Thiago’s injury occurred. He comments to Arjen Robben: ‘You’ve always got to go in fully engaged to win the ball, never relax your challenge. Take care between now and the end of the season that you don’t let the same thing happen to you.’