Pep Confidential (14 page)

Dortmund, a city proud of itself and of its yellow-and-black Borussia, gives Pep a brutal welcome. This is the real Bundesliga, where even in the month of July the jet-fuelled rockets of the Champions League runners-up are ready and waiting. The home team has made only one change to its line-up since the Wembley final, 63 days ago. Nuri Şahin replaces the injured Łukasz Piszczek in the centre of the field. Dortmund’s line-up, playing their traditional 4-2-3-1, is: Roman Weidenfeller; Kevin Grosskreutz, Mats Hummels, Neven Subotić, Marcel Schmelzer; Nuri Şahin, Sven Bender; Jakub Błaszczykowski, İlkay Gündogan, Marco Reus and Robert Lewandowski.

In contrast, Neuer, Dante, Schweinsteiger, Javi Martínez and Ribéry are all missing from the Bayern team that won the Champions League. Out on the pitch there’s Thiago as the sole holding midfielder, with Kroos and Müller as attacking midfielders; Robben and Mandžukić play on the wings and Shaqiri at centre-forward. The formation is 4-3-3: Starke; Lahm, Van Buyten, Boateng, Alaba; Thiago, Müller, Kroos; Robben, Shaqiri, Mandžukić.

Having swithered between patience and passion, the coach has decided to go straight on to the attack. He restores Lahm to the back four, but the starting XI signifies that Pep’s team will play the majority of the game in a 4-2-4 formation, specifically thanks to Müller’s tendency to join the forwards. There is no escaping the fact that he’s a striker. From here, Guardiola knows in his bones that he can’t use this guy in the midfield because his basic instincts impede him being sufficiently disciplined to hold a key position in the middle of the pitch.

Pep has fallen victim to his own ambitious plans and although Bayern do succeed in penetrating Borussia’s defensive lines, they struggle to dominate such a strong counter-attacking team. Given the state they have arrived in, Pep’s team could have done with Lahm’s vital defensive discipline in the centre of the pitch, but he has chosen to jump in without a lifebelt and attack. He pays a high price for the decision.

It’s all sufficient to confirm that Dortmund remain rock-hard at home. Notwithstanding the fact that they get a gift from the visitors after barely five minutes. Neuer’s replacement, Tom Starke, is the guilty party and the 1-0 lead signifies that Klopp’s team can dig in, switch to 4-4-2, allow Bayern the ball, try to channel them wide – then wait for the opportunity to counter-attack.

In just a few years, Jürgen Klopp has created a killing machine. Borussia are runners-up in the Champions League, Bundesliga champions in 2011 and 2012 and this stadium appears unassailable.

The humidity in Dortmund is stifling, much like it is in Barcelona, perhaps to remind Pep of his roots. The players sweat their way through the match and there is a refreshment break or
Trinkpause
in each half. The coaches decide when they take place. Klopp calls the first one in the 24th minute with the score in his team’s favour. Whilst his players have a drink and rehydrate the Dortmund coach gathers his defenders together to give them their instructions. A few metres away Guardiola is talking to his forwards and it is this contrasting image that provides the perfect symbol of the two rivals’ different strategies.

Borussia don’t mind not having the ball. On the contrary, they are quite happy to bide their time and then pounce. They don’t need the ball at their feet because of the fact that they dominate available space so intelligently. They’re not embarrassed to appear over-run – the more they are forced back the better they seem to defend.

It’s eight men back, with Gündogen and Lewandowski left in the centre circle to pick up the scraps or spearhead the counter. Thus Bayern set up camp in the Dortmund half and seek out the chinks in their armour – but it’s a hard shift and rarely successful.

Klopp goes into the dressing room looking like he thinks he’s planned things better than Guardiola.

After half-time the Bayern coach switches his attacking players. He sends Robben to the left, Mandžukić to the centre of attack and Shaqiri to the right. This apparently minor adjustment changes everything. Thiago and Lahm start to turn the tide and the equaliser comes from an intricate pass from Thiago to his captain, who crosses for a Robben header. Bayern have equalised. They seem to have reached a turning point at last, but the illusion is short lived. In barely 180 seconds the scoreboard goes from 1-0 to 3-1, leaving the men from Munich humiliated and emotionally broken.

Kroos is slow and Van Buyten is distraught after he scores an own goal to make it 2-1. Gündogan, a prodigious midfielder, puts the third goal away almost immediately and suddenly it’s all become very tough for Bayern. Guardiola could not have imagined just how hard the game in Dortmund would be.

Despite everything, Bayern fight on and three things happen: Robben scores and narrows the margin; Müller hits the crossbar, and Borussia continue to punish Bayern whenever they lose their shape.

Thiago’s game symbolises this tension. He makes wonderful passes in attack and then loses the ball when he’s defending. His passes result in a goal and Bayern hitting the post. But the one he gives away becomes Dortmund’s fourth goal. The paradox is bittersweet for the player who is trapped in the battle between those who dominate the ball and those who dominate space.

This same battle is raging all over the football world and it is clear that the ultimate winners will be those teams who manage to find a balance between the two approaches. In Germany, Bayern and Dortmund represent the two models. Guardiola wants his players to play calmly and with a bit of nous towards the centre circle, and then unleash a rapid attack.

Finding the right combination of different rhythms will be vital for his team’s future but at the moment they are not getting it right. Thiago’s game sums up the challenges that await them. In this Super Cup final he exploits the cracks in his opponents’ defence brilliantly but fails to protect his own team.

The defeat is even more of a blow for Guardiola than it is for the club. This was the first of the six titles Bayern have set their sights on this season, determined to build on Jupp Heynckes’ successful campaign, which the Catalan coach is keen to honour every time he speaks in public.

The match has been played with a passion and intensity hard to match anywhere else in Europe at this stage of the season and the result has people asking if today marks the start of a new champion’s reign.

One year ago, in the summer of 2012, Heynckes’ Bayern hosted Klopp’s Borussia to compete for the same Super Cup title. At the time Bayern had just missed out on two Champions League titles, two consecutive Bundesliga trophies and had lost the last five encounters with Borussia, the last of which had been a bloody 5-2 thrashing. But the men from Munich would end up winning the 2012 Super Cup and march towards their historic treble.

Right now Jürgen Klopp would love today’s win against Guardiola to have the same effect on Borussia. He has cleared the first hurdle and the scene has been set for the intense rivalry that should dominate the season.

Guardiola has worked hard in his first month as Bayern coach but he now understands the full extent of what he still has to do if he wishes to dominate in Europe. He also discovers that in Germany coaches attend post-match press conferences together. The German is glowing, absolutely radiant. The Catalan is stunned. He misunderstands a question from a local journalist and struggles to give a clear assessment of the match. At times he rambles and seems to have his head elsewhere, perhaps on the Signal Iduna Park bench, as if he would dearly love to wind back the clock to 8.30pm and the start of the match so that they can play it all over again. He hasn’t been particularly smart during the 90 minutes and his starting line-up was surprising for the absence of Lahm in the centre of the pitch. Why had he done away with the
Lahm formula
which had been so successful in previous games?

Throughout the joint press conference Guardiola seems to be brooding on this. He has been slow. It’s as if his sabbatical year in New York has reduced the speed of his reactions. This is only the second final he has lost as a coach. The first was the 2011 Copa del Rey against Real Madrid, but he has been sluggish today, a bit like the stiflingly hot weather in Dortmund.

He is numb and appears distracted throughout the press conference, during which he mistakenly answers a question not meant for him. But he accepts the defeat graciously and warmly congratulates Klopp: ‘Borussia deserved to win.’

He must be wondering if Klopp’s team is his new Numancia
¹
, despite the huge differences between the Spanish minnows and these German giants – the initial blunder that marks the start of a glorious campaign.

For the club, it is nothing more than an insignificant slip-up – the Super Cup is considered unimportant in Germany. However, the coach feels deeply wounded. He hates losing.

His family have been in Dortmund since midday and will go back to Munich with him for a few days. His three children are wearing white shirts with red stripes. Pep wipes off his sweat and picks up his youngest daughter, Valentina, whilst explaining a few of the game’s tactics to his middle son, Màrius.

By chance he sits down beside his friend Estiarte as the red bus pulls out of Westfalen Stadion. The two sit together, just as they did five years ago, returning from Barça’s defeat by Numancia.

They are moving on from this moment of defeat. Three little kids in red-and-white shirts wave goodbye. The journey has begun again – as steep and as treacherous as ever.

¹
Numancia is a small Spanish team which defeated Barça in Guardiola’s first league match as coach in August 2008.

PART TWO

THE FIRST TROPHY

‘Chess, that game of logic par excellence,
consists of luck, luck and more luck.’
SAVIELLY TARTAKOWER, GRAND MASTER

15

‘MAYBE IT WAS A MISTAKE.’

Munich, July 29, 2013

NEUER AND RIBÉRY train as normal with the rest of the group – a little surprisingly. Just 40 hours after the German Super Cup they are both fit again. Inevitably, questions are being asked about such a speedy recovery. If they were unable to play on Saturday night, how on earth can they have recovered in time for midday on Monday? Had Bayern erred too much on the side of caution in not using them against Borussia?

Neuer had had a little problem in his abductor muscle and Ribéry had a leg knock. The doctors had advised that their injuries were sufficiently serious for them not even to consider travelling to Dortmund, yet here they both are, rested and fit and training under the Munich downpour. It’s the first thing Guardiola asks himself. At Barcelona the coach was used to exploring all the options to ensure that a player made it into the team, right up until the last moment. Whenever Barça players suffered injuries like those which kept Neuer and Ribéry out against Dortmund, they would travel with the team and undergo a last-minute medical examination just before the game. In Munich, things are done differently and the coach is not sure he approves. Perhaps, he thinks, if Neuer and Ribéry had come with them to Dortmund they might have examined them mid-afternoon to see if they were fit to play. Perhaps they would have been match fit and the final would have turned out differently. Perhaps.

‘Damn that Barça match, damn it. Never again will I agree to a friendly three days before a final. Never again.’

Guardiola is still brooding on the game against his former club and its consequences. His technical assistants have reviewed the Super Cup final and think much the same as they did when they were watching it live: a series of individual errors had led to the team’s downfall. The coach’s decision not to protect Thiago with Lahm’s support is seen as another possible contributory factor. ‘Maybe it was a mistake,’ admits one of the technical team. Today’s training session is open to the public and hundreds of fans, huddled under their umbrellas, crowd into Säbener Strasse. An almost religious silence descends as they, too, listen to the coach’s instructions.

It’s a downpour. The players had hoped for a break in the weather after days of asphyxiating heat, but not like this. It’s bucketing down when Mario Götze trots out on to the training pitch. The medics have given him the all-clear but, seeing the deluge, the player hangs back for a while, which gives me the opportunity to chat to him about the immense passion of his old club, Dortmund. ‘It’s absolutely brutal playing there. The Südkurve is the biggest stand in the world and when you’re on the pitch it towers over you like a mountain.’

In a few months he’ll come face to face with that mountain again.

Götze has the ball at his feet for the first time in many months. He makes several fast, intense sprints and seems to have completely recovered from the muscle tear he suffered exactly 90 days ago. Although the original injury was not particularly serious, he aggravated it by returning too early in an attempt to make the Champions League final. But there is light at the end of the tunnel now and Guardiola tells him that he wants him back with the group by next Friday.