Pep Confidential (11 page)

But Pep also makes it clear that pressing of this ferocity around the opposition penalty area won’t be the norm in the coming season. ‘We’ll need to work this hard on the pressing only against a team like Barça and perhaps one or two more. Every other team … well, the second or third time we press them hard they’ll just resort to kicking the ball long and gifting us possession. We’ll have other preparatory work to do – against teams who want to put the ball long over the heads of our defence to make them have to turn, and in defending the second ball when a team mounts a counter-attack.’

Lorenzo Buenaventura explains why Guardiola insists on perfecting this exercise when it isn’t something he plans to use frequently.

‘He doesn’t like to leave anything to chance and is the kind of coach who makes sure his players understand every manoeuvre, even the ones they’ll use only three times a season maximum. He wants his men to have a range of tools at their disposal. The majority of teams won’t play out from the back when they face the greats like Bayern, Barça, Arsenal, Madrid or Manchester City.

‘Therefore, knowing how to press the keeper and his full-backs via strikers who are pushed as high up the pitch as possible is a resource we’ll need rarely. But we must know how to do it. That’s why Pep likes to explain it and keep on explaining it throughout the year.’

The second objective of this training session focuses on ensuring players combine and co-operate to press the opposition (wherever on the pitch) and on marking. When the central defender goes out to press the opposition striker, the organising midfielder must drop back and fill his space. If the full-back moves up to press the winger, then the central defender must move to cover and, once again, the
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midfielder must drop back to cover the central defender. If they succeed in pressing the winger then the full-back, central defender and organising midfielder will each have been crucial in robbing the ball back.

The Bayern players go over these moves again and again. From time to time Pep stops the game and corrects them, especially Boateng and Højbjerg. He wants them to get to the point that co-ordination between them becomes instinctive. ‘It has to be instantaneous. If Jérôme moves up to challenge, Højbjerg, you cover his position. If Lahm runs, Jérôme covers him and Højbjerg covers Jérôme.’

Pierre-Emile Højbjerg, like Sergio Busquets, the linchpin of Barcelona, has a natural sense of position. It is an innate skill and something he has never needed to work on. At just 17 he does most of the right things automatically. He has also come along ready and willing to learn, unlike another promising young player who seems to react badly to Guardiola’s corrections.

A team is a living entity. Some players develop and improve, like Shaqiri, who is impressing the coach with his work, or Højbjerg and Boateng, who seem to soak up every little detail. But there are also others who disengage, either in terms of performance or their attitude. A team is not a homogenous group.

If he had been there, Rummenigge would have enjoyed the training session, but he has still not arrived in Trentino. He is tying up the loose ends of Mario Gómez’s transfer to Fiorentina and once he closes this deal he will get on with that of Thiago. The player has already reached an agreement with the Munich team and is not interested in going anywhere else. No one from Bayern anticipates any opposition from Barça, who have for some time been very open about their wish to sell the player. When Guardiola was still coaching Barça, in the summer of 2011, the club was already testing the market. Later, they agreed to include an escape clause in the player’s contract, which detailed that if Thiago played less than a stated minimum number of minutes per year, his rescission fee would drop hugely, to €18 million instead of the prohibitive €90 million figure in his original contract. Later, having won the Spanish league, nobody at Barça was interested in changing the team dynamic just so that Thiago could reach the target amount of playing time and it seems unlikely that the club is going to reject a reasonable offer now.

At the end of today’s training session Arjen Robben will explain what he sees as Bayern’s main virtue: ‘We don’t have a Messi or a Cristiano Ronaldo, but we do have the right collective mentality. We also have quality players, players who stand out. When we attack, we are always looking for the next goal and our defence is compact and co-ordinated. That is our strength.’

Guardiola approaches the bench, visibly pleased with the team’s work.

‘That’s how Barça trained that first year! That’s how they trained that first year, like beasts,’ he repeats. ‘It just isn’t possible to always be at the top of the mountain. [Usain] Bolt, [Roger] Federer … we thought they would never stop winning, but it’s not possible, it’s just not possible.’

His response evokes that of Garry Kasparov in New York: ‘Impossible!’

Despite being champions, Bayern are hungry. Desperately hungry. It’s as if they have not yet made it to the top of the mountain.

‘Right now we are all hungry. The players, because they have a new coach and new concepts to learn and they want to win playing a little bit better than they have in the past; me, because I want to win with a different set of players. Let’s see if we can do it.’

11

‘WHO ARE OUR UNSTOPPABLE GUYS? RIBÉRY AND ROBBEN.’

Arco, July 8, 2013

PEP NOW HAS a clear mental picture of the line-up with which he would like to start the season. Neuer in goal, with Lahm and Alaba supporting him as full-backs, although Rafinha is also performing very well in training and will be a great alternative; Javi Martínez, Boateng and Dante are the three players who will have to share the two central defensive positions.

In front of them, Schweinsteiger will slot in as the only dedicated holding midfielder. While it’s certainly true that he did his best work last season as part of a double
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partnership, Guardiola thinks that his vice-captain is fully capable of performing at the same level solo. Beside him, he’ll have Kroos and Thiago, two attacking midfielders with tremendous creative skill. Thiago, of course, has not even signed yet. If, in the end, he doesn’t make it to Bayern, then Götze could take his place. In attack, Guardiola has a number of options, although all of them, of course, include Ribéry. In the coming months, however, Pep will come to appreciate the massive gulf between the line-up he is considering now, in early July, and the reality of events as they unfold.

Amongst other things, within the next six months, by the end of 2013, the team will have suffered a virtual epidemic of injuries. Only four players will make it to Christmas injury-free; reserve goalkeeper Tom Starke, midfielder Boateng, defender Van Buyten and the forward Thomas Müller. The 20 remaining players will all have fallen victim to injuries. Some of them, such as Neuer, Mandžukić and Alaba will get off lightly, but for Schweinsteiger, Thiago and Robben, the damage will be far more serious. And that’s without even mentioning Holger Badstuber, who will find himself spending his second year trying to recover from injury. This situation will ruin Guardiola’s plans, oblige him to reinvent players to cover certain positions and force him to change many tactical decisions. All of this will make it much more difficult for his players to assimilate new game plans. Things will move much more slowly as a result.

The coach is anticipating none of this as he sits here on the bench in Arco, having just completed another work session, and explains how he envisages his Bayern will play. In this respect he is spot-on. Slowly but surely, Bayern will produce the football Pep intends them to play. And on July 8, 2013, Guardiola anticipates that Bayern’s future success will be driven by what happens on the wings.

At first glance this may seem surprising, because in his days as a player and coach at Barça the team’s game was driven from the midfield. Think of the Barcelona midfield from the 2011 Champions League final against Manchester United: Sergio Busquets, Xavi, Andrés Iniesta, and even Lionel Messi dropping back from his false 9 position. Maintaining superiority in the central area was always part of the Pep brand. Could he dispense with this at Bayern? In reality, no. He is trying to explain that he still wants that same superiority in the centre, but now he wants to go one step further and redouble the team’s efforts on the wings.

At Barça, Guardiola had Leo Messi, whom he calls ‘the beast,’ ‘the animal’. Messi was the perfect solution for Barça. His team-mates would outnumber and overwhelm the opposition in the midfield, give him the ball and then he’d do the rest. There would be no Messi at Bayern. Pep would have talented players such as Mario Götze – able, elusive, intelligent and a prodigious goal-scorer – and Mario Mandžukić, another superb striker and a tough, efficient warrior. But Messi was in a different dimension.

So, under the hot Italian sun, Pep unveils his playing idea. As ever he wants his players to establish numerical superiority in midfield, but to also cause the opposition chaos in the wide positions. At Barça, Iniesta and Xavi dominated down the middle, where Messi would then destroy the opposition defence. At Bayern, Guardiola sees things slightly differently.

‘Who are our unstoppable guys? The wide guys – Ribéry and Robben. We have to use that weapon. We have to be superior down the middle of midfield, but open up the width with diagonal passes. That means we have to push the whole team upfield in order to release Robben and Ribéry, because they can’t be dropping deep to start the play.’ He will explain this over and over again.

Within just two weeks of arriving, it has already become the coach’s obsession – Ribéry and Robben must no longer be making 80-metre runs up and down the wing to attack, defend and re-start the play. ‘If they are the ones re-starting the play so deep, they’ll have both the opposition midfielder and full-back in front of them to get away from. That makes it really difficult. However, if we set a really high line and establish our central defenders where the midfield would normally be, then it will limit our opponents’ scope to double up on the wingers. We will convert each play into a one-vs-one situation. In that type of situation our guys are the very best and I’d back them to get goals. They can also cross excellently and we’ve got top-quality finishers to put those chances away. At Barça, Messi did the destroying down the middle of the pitch – at Bayern it will be Ribéry and Robben – but from the wings.’

These then are his plans in the month of July. It will take him more than six months before all his men are available and he will need all his creative powers to solve the difficulties ahead.

However, it isn’t enough to explain how he wants them to play. This is something that has to be worked on day in, day out. As Lorenzo Buenaventura explains: ‘Pep has told me that we will put much more emphasis on the wide positions than we did at Barcelona. Why? Because there are different ingredients in the recipe here. Across five Barça matches how many times will our full-back get up and cross into the opposition box? Perhaps four times per match – at most. Because when Messi played wide, at the beginning, he’d always try to get by his man with a dribble, rather than cross. If Dani Alves reaches the byeline then normally he’ll cut the ball back, rather than cross. Moreover we didn’t have so many goal-scorers, so four crosses per match would be a high number. But at Bayern there’ll be games where we cross more than 20 times, because we simply must feed Müller and Mandžukić. Obviously, if you’ve got the ball out wide and you see these two penalty-box predators arriving then the normal thing is to get the ball into them. Bayern are infinitely more equipped to take advantage of the ball into the box than Barça were – better than most, in fact. Pep’s big challenge is to successfully create chances from wide positions, but still keep order in the middle of the pitch to protect against the opposition’s counter-attack – to be aware of where the ball will drop if it’s cleared from a cross and, thus, attack the second ball too, not just the first cross.’

The Bayern fitness coach, who is also a qualified football and swimming coach, will put extra care into supporting this part of Pep’s strategy. He’ll create special training routines to re-create this complicated pattern that Pep wants to achieve: establishing superiority in midfield, opening up the wings for the guys who can destroy the opposition, finishing on the volley inside the penalty area and at the same time being properly placed to cut out a counter-attack.

Some weeks later, at the end of September, Buenaventura will, over coffee on a non-training day, recall this conversation in Trentino and explain further: ‘A few days ago we trained in the headquarters of the bank that sponsors Bayern [HypoVereinsbank]. The main exercise involved three men playing the ball out from the back – sometimes with the full-back tight with them, sometimes pushed forward; in front of them, the
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and two attacking midfielders, plus three forwards. The attacking moves need a diagonal pass, breaking through one opposition line. At the end of the move, our attacking midfielder should be on the edge of the box. We’d place one of the dummies from the free-kick walls in the place we wanted him to end up, so that any counter-attack could be snuffed out. It was a curious routine to stage.’

After a few days, Pep explained to the players why they had done the exercise: ‘Do you remember that day that you did this and you were meant to end up positioned next to the dummy? Well the reason was…’

Buenaventura continues: ‘All of this is the result of the analysis Pep carried out on German football: who played counter-attack football, how, and how to protect against it. It meant reaching the opposition penalty box in numbers and all at the same time, and always vigilant not to suddenly be caught on the counter. If it’s already tough to co-ordinate a good, effective, balanced attack, imagine how hard it is to add in the fact that we needed to have half our minds on what would happen if the attack broke down and how to be prepared for the opposition counter-attack! This is the ‘extra’ that Pep has: to be capable of analysing how they play in any given country, to not renounce his own strengths [in this case the wide play in which Bayern excel] but to be prepared to protect ourselves against the breakdown and the counter, all at the same time. And every day introducing another small detail of his own plus one or two about the opposition team.’