The Sunday Mail
IT is Boxing Day that excites Pep Guardiola. Not for him a day of bitter familial squabbling over the remote control, not for him overdosing on indigestion tablets or failing to corral his offspring on to an improving walk. Rather this is what he has come to England to experience. Twice at his first press conference as Manchester City manager, he mentioned the day after Christmas in a tone of reverence.
Playing matches when the rest of European football is enjoying its winter break, going out with the wind howling and the sleet horizontal, with the pitch rutted and bumpy: this is the challenge he cannot wait to tackle.
Then he will properly know he can flourish outside his comfort zone. This coming football season, we can now be in no doubt, is to be the season of the manager, the year when the cult of the coach reaches its apex.
The Premier League may not be able to boast the best players, or the most successful teams, or even in these days of choreographed Icelandic clapping, the most innovative fan culture. But it can now pride itself on the biggest concentration of managerial talent.
Jose Mourinho, Antonio Conte, Jürgen Klopp: wherever you look the top men are congregating here. And, as he introduced himself to his new cohort of potential critics, the finest of the lot gave indication as to why he had headed north.
“I don’t know the reasons the other coaches came here,” he said. “I can only speak about me. I came as a player two or three times to see this atmosphere and as a coach I came many times and said, ‘Wow that is really good’.”
England, he pointed out, was different. Now he wanted to embrace its differentness. He wanted to learn from Brian Kidd and Mikel Arteta, his new assistants, what it is like to play on Boxing Day. He had clearly heard many times the sniped insistence that he had had things easy, that an automaton could manage Barcelona or Bayern Munich, where the resources are on another plane entirely to their rivals.
He is well versed in the central critique of the Guardiola way, that his system of intelligent, vibrant football would crumble under the unforgiving scrutiny of a wet Wednesday in Stoke. That was why he had come to England, he said: to prove to everyone that it could, that he had the coaching wherewithal to adapt to any circumstance.
“I never before go to the stadiums where it is freezing and windy,” he said. “And I say why not play good [football] when it is freezing and windy. That is a target for me, a personal ambition.”
The Premier League, he suggested, is now the testing ground for any manager, the place where the competition is so ruthless and unyielding there is no room to hide, the place properly to prove yourself. To paraphrase Frank Sinatra: if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
So it is that he cannot wait to pitch himself against Sunderland and Sam Allardyce in City’s opening fixture of the season. Or, as he referred to his first opponent in a tone that strayed mighty close to the deferential: “The Big Sam.”
Despite the razzmatazz of his official welcome to City earlier in the week, Guardiola is a technocrat, not a showman. He may sport the priciest of tailoring – the three-piece suit he wore to his unveiling was so sharp it is a surprise it did not set the Etihad security screens bleeping when he arrived – but there is nothing remotely flash about his approach to his job.
Quietly spoken, admitting to a touch of nerves, resolutely diplomatic, in his opening address he set himself no targets, fuelled no verbal feuds, suggested what he had to offer was simply a determination to do his best. He even praised the architecture of his surrounds.
“Really amazing,” he said of the lush lawns of the Etihad’s training complex. “When we play bad the facilities will not be the reason why.” If it is sound bites they are after, then, the Manchester press corps will be far better served this season down the road at Old Trafford.
But for the City fans Guardiola’s message was one to relish. He said he would work hard to help Raheem Sterling improve, that he was determined to bridge the gap between the club’s excellent academy and the first team, that he would do everything he could to get Vincent Kompany fit and Yaya Touré firing.
Plus, he insisted that there was nothing complicated about his approach to the game. The players will quickly understand what is required of them. “What we want is so simple,” he said. “When the opponent has the ball take it back as soon as possible. When you have it, move it as much as possible, create as many chances as possible.”
He made it sound beautifully straightforward. We wait to discover how it will work away at Hull on Boxing Day. — Telegraph
