Pep Confidential (25 page)

The team talk on Monday 16th, the day before their Champions League debut, focuses solely on this 3-4-2-1. The players are called to Säbener Strasse’s video room, which is laid out like a cinema, but Guardiola gets them on their feet and tells them to go outside to the terrace. He points to training pitch No.1, where there are four lines newly painted to delineate the central area of the pitch, like a giant extension of the Bayern penalty area. Later in the book we’ll talk in greater detail about these lines.

‘The only important thing about our game is what happens in those four lines,’ Pep tells his men. ‘Nothing else matters.’

They go back inside and Pep shows his players the video analysis of their U movement on the pitch. The images show that again and again they re-start the play from the back in a manner which is predictable and sterile, an innocuous movement of the ball from side to side. From Ribéry to Alaba, to Dante, on to Boateng, to Rafinha and then, finally, to Robben. The whole shape of the ball movement draws out a capital U. Sometimes Neuer is involved in that passing movement too, even Lahm at
pivote
. It is a horizontal trajectory which takes the team nowhere. The opponent can defend almost effortlessly because Bayern players simply don’t try to break their lines.

‘Gentlemen, this is
tiquitaca
and it is shit. We’re not interested in this type of possession. It’s totally meaningless. It’s about passing for the sake of it. We need our central midfielder and our defenders to move out with an offensive mentality and break the opposition lines in order to push the whole team high up. The U needs to go.’

The 3-4-2-1 is now installed, flexible and intelligent, with the positioning of the two full-backs in line with the two attacking midfielders. These false attacking midfielders (the full-backs) are without doubt the biggest tactical advance of his first season at Bayern. The all-out war against
tiquitaca
– shuffling the ball about in meaningless possession – is also established.

CSKA Moscow will be the first victim of the new strategy the next night. It has been 511 days since Pep last heard the Champions League music and his first match back is a joy. Not only do Bayern beat the Moscow team 3-0 but they are playing fluid, aggressive football. They go on the offensive; the U and their sterile passing are things of the past. Lahm is in midfield again; Rafinha and Alaba do well in their new roles; Müller enjoys playing as second striker behind Mandžukić and Schweinsteiger has a few minutes game time to test out Kroos’ position. What’s more, their second goal comes from a move they had practised the previous day at training: from a wide free-kick Ribéry and Robben pretend to fall out over who will take it, almost bumping into each other as they both approach the ball but then suddenly the Dutchman whips it in to Mandžukić, who heads home unmarked. Even though he looks offside, the Russian defence has been bamboozled into dozing off.

Domènec Torrent and Hermann Gerland embrace Pep enthusiastically. His strategic ideas have worked. It is gratifying for the technical team to see their tactics converted into a goal and for Guardiola it is the first time in a match this year that he has felt that the team is moving in the right direction. Nobody has needed a half-time lecture to change the dynamic and his wingers have understood exactly what he wants. For the first time in six years the Champions League starts with the reigning champions winning their first match (the last time was when AC Milan beat Benfica 2-1 in 2007; all successive champions have drawn their first match.)

Months later writer Ronald Reng, author of
A Life Too Short
about the tragically premature death of goalkeeper Robert Enke, would tell me: ‘They played brilliantly and were passing with such speed and fluidity that they made CSKA look like a Third Division team. They reminded me of Barça in 2009, but with Bayern’s typical speed on the counter-attack and their ability to close down spaces when they lost the ball. That game was our first sighting of a team the likes of which we had never seen before in Germany.’

The whole playing philosophy is reinforced after the visit to Gelsenkirchen, and a cauldron of a stadium, to face Schalke 04. With the ball, Bayern are clearly playing 3-4-2-1 and when they lose it they defend in a 4-3-3. The team plays with much more fluidity. The forward three players are given freedom and they slash through Schalke both down the middle and out wide. Robben plays predominantly down the right wing and that allows Rafinha to move inside and do damage there. Down the left Ribéry and Alaba incessantly switch positions, one inside, one out.

When he looks back at this time Guardiola has good reason to smile. A week earlier he had been depressed, unable to find the right ingredients to make his team excel; now, seven days later, he has three wins under his belt, with the scores getting increasingly better (2-0 against Hannover; 3-0 against CSKA and 4-0 against Schalke). More importantly, they are well on the way to developing the balance their game requires. The idea of using full-backs as midfielders is bearing fruit. Everything has fallen into place.

Two hours earlier and a considerable distance away, Borussia Dortmund drew in Nuremberg. So, after the sixth league game of the season, the two great rivals are neck-and-neck with 16 points. The league is won or lost in those first eight games.

31

THE TREASURE MAP

Munich, September 18, 2013

GUARDIOLA HAS THE treasure map stored in his head. It’s a secret map containing riddles and mysteries, a devious puzzle – dots which will be joined up as and when the mysteries which arise along the route are resolved. Contained in this map are all the questions and most of the answers. Some Pep will solve in public, others on the pitch. There are a few which are just in stasis for the time being, waiting for the right moment.

This might all seem trivial, but it assumes great importance in the life of the Catalan coach. It means that he knows that during the length of a particular career cycle (be that four months, a season or the entirety of a contract at a club) he will have to confront a series of decisions and tactical alterations – they are inevitable and related inherently to his personal football philosophy. For example, his first year at Barcelona had very little in common with his third. Here we are talking about tactical organisation, individual player movements within the team framework, or how the team interacted collectively.

Pep traces out a tactical business plan for each such cycle. It is kept inside his head, there is no written evidence. Take the formidable Bayern which he inherits from Heynckes. Guardiola knows that there’s only so much new software he can introduce into the existing hardware of this ultra-dominant team. If he overdoses on new ideas then he will probably overload, or collapse the whole system and surely some individual components. Thus he prepares by establishing a plan of how to roll out his ideas – a goal-related strategy which sets objectives to be achieved within a given time period. They are not milestones which are easy to explain in words, nor will they necessarily be pertinent if extrapolated for other teams, players or coaches. They are relevant to his personal way of understanding football. It’s not even that he aims for his players to understand every single thing. He is well aware there are some players who have a high capacity for complex explanations, and others whose understanding will be more limited. He will have clear defining lines between those who will be given short, contained, partial information bytes and those who have the ability to see the big picture.

Pep will use quite different language from one category of players to another. That’s not new to him. In fact, one of the great conflicts within sport is what type of language and communication coaches should use when they are trying to get technical messages across to their players. Sometimes the communication is sophisticated, sometimes very basic.

What’s utterly vital is getting the means of communication, the content, the amount and the precise timing of every such conversation just right. Without that, a coach can’t develop his tactical ideas adequately with his players. Guardiola faces a challenge in this respect. He is very agile and talented at drawing this personal treasure map, his business plan. He has terrific foresight in terms of knowing how much he can expect from a four-month cycle or a season and thus which innovations he’ll need to store up for the next cycle, whenever that may be.

Going over his four years with Barça he will recall every single evolution he tried to roll out and also those which he would have applied if he had stayed with the Catalan club. Ask him about Bayern and he is more reserved; he’ll explain only the short-term upgrades he intends to enforce. He’ll clam up if you ask about the following season – even though he knows full well what he wants to try to achieve then, too.

Despite all this clarity of ideology it is very hard to transmit it successfully to his players. It’s not so much a problem of the language, nor of finding the right football terminology. It is a problem of excess software. Sometimes he has so many things to say, he wants to reach such infinite detail that some players just can’t follow it all. In such cases he can take time to realise that the player in question simply needs much less information, and in simpler form, too.

Let’s take Franck Ribéry as an example. You could compare him to a 100m runner in terms of his characteristic comprehension and behavior. If you make the message sophisticated for Ribéry you are only complicating the progress of the desired evolution. Guardiola took months to find just the right way to pick and choose his words when explaining things to the player. From the first training session he asked the winger to move inside and play false 9. Pep is convinced that Ribéry can be doubly dangerous if he’ll do the things he does on the wing, but around the edge of the box instead. There’s no chalk line to limit you on one side and, logically, you have more space in which to search for openings and run at players. Pep is a firm believer that the Frenchman could make a big difference to the team down the middle, but Ribéry isn’t particularly quick at picking up on the type of movements the coach is explaining. They are too sophisticated, too complex to assimilate quickly and Pep decides to put the whole thing off until an opportune moment arises, possibly months in the future.

The opposite example is Lahm, for whom you can make the message just as complex as you wish. Pep and he have dedicated many hours to such conversations. Not a training session goes by when they don’t spend at least 15 minutes at the end talking about specific player movements or individual actions. That’s when Pep steps back and gets into one of his favourite rituals – indicating where every individual player should be at any given moment with a symphony of gestures, his arms waving around. Who has got to cover whom; where should the
pivote
be; how should the central defender make a choice to attack the ball; how does the full-back on the side which is overloaded with opposition react. It demands great concentration just to recall what the original objective of the conversation was.

Every time I was present for one of these chats and Pep hypothesised these complex collective movements, I ended up lost. It’s not easy following his vision. But Lahm always got it.

32

‘LAHM? HE’S AS FOOTBALL-INTELLIGENT AS INIESTA.’

Munich, September 25, 2013

THE CONCEPT OF using full-backs as midfielders, forming a line of four in the middle with the two attacking midfielders, had already been used frequently at Barcelona, albeit with variations. Pep had even started to talk about the idea at the end of some of the early training sessions with Bayern in Trentino, when he had only just arrived. He even hinted at it in a press conference: ‘No question, Alaba could also play as a midfielder.’ In reality he wasn’t really thinking of Alaba in the middle of the pitch – rather as a full-back who would be pushed up to join the line of the existing midfielders. How did the idea arise? Well, it had been there in Pep’s playing manual, just waiting for the right moment to have the dust shaken off.

Let’s look at how Pep rolled the idea out to his squad. First he analysed the problem. Bayern were circulating the ball back and forwards in a passive U shape between the two wings, Ribéry and Robben, using the two centre-halves and both full-backs. Thus he rescued an idea which he had not been able to use during his four seasons at the Camp Nou. ‘Every year at Barça,’ he told me, ‘we’d achieve new ways to evolve from what we’d already established, and the team was improving, but from the World Club Cup final onwards [they beat Neymar’s Santos 4-0] it really wasn’t easy to find a way forward with the same players. We had managed to play better than ever before and to find a way to move forward wasn’t simple.’

One of the ideas he was developing in this era concerned the left-back (not the right, as Dani Alves is not exactly the model of tactical rigour).

‘The tactical evolution which I’d envisaged at that time with Barça consisted of using the left-back to step forward and play as a second
pivote
. We already knew that the full-backs could move up as high as the
pivote
while he was bringing the ball out from the back, but without overlapping him until he’d already played the ball forward. The idea was to then leave the left-back paired with the
pivote
so that, if necessary, we could defend with a
doble pivote
system in midfield – even though the team didn’t line up that way.’

He explained all this to us in pre-season. ‘It’s an idea I’m going to save up, perhaps use it in the future.’

Sunday, September 15, beaten and down in the dumps, but in solution-seeking mode, Guardiola reached for the idea and adapted it. Erasing some of the existing delineations, he reached the idea of a formation which seemed ideal: it wouldn’t be the left-back who teamed up with the central midfielder but, instead, both full-backs, who would advance sufficiently to be in a line of four with the two attacking midfielders – a line which would be higher up the pitch than the
pivote
. Things suddenly clicked.