Pep Confidential (45 page)

Schweinsteiger gets a header on target from a corner, but Iker Casillas makes a straightforward save. Robben hits a deflected shot from outside the area.

Then Kroos hits a shot which comes off Pepe and bounces to Benzema. No Bayern player defends the move well and 19 seconds later the ball is beyond Neuer and in the net – scored at close range by Benzema, who started the move, from Fábio Coentrão’s centre.

This is a tired team which has dug deep away from home. They have dominated the ball, shown bravery, but concede from what is practically the home side’s first chance.

Bayern go through a dip which lasts six minutes, during which Madrid generate two moderate chances on goal as well as a Cristiano Ronaldo near miss.

The German team rally and subdue Madrid until, in the last minute of the first half, Angel di Maria goes face-to-face with Neuer, and shoots over.

Madrid have conceded nine corners in that first half, but still manage to limit Bayern’s efforts on target. Pep’s team has dominated the play, but rarely put themselves in a position to beat Casillas.

After the break Madrid control the ball completely for the first six minutes but the game then changes and Bayern begin to dominate. Guardiola’s team has been slightly stronger in attack and has managed to reduce Madrid’s counter-attacks to just one, from Gareth Bale in the 88th minute.

Müller and Götze come on for Ribéry and Mandžukić and Bayern surrender some of their control in exchange for creating more chances, culminating in the 84th minute with a shot on goal by Götze – it’s a clear chance, but Casillas deflects it.

Bayern are sterile in attack. Fifteen corners, 31 crosses into the box, 94% pass accuracy and 18 shots on target (double Madrid’s number) – to no effect. Götze’s miss is typical. It could have been the goal
Kalle
Rummenigge had asked for the day that they were drawn against Madrid. ‘If we score in the Bernabéu we’ll be in the final for sure.’ But Götze fluffs it, Casillas saves and the men from Munich leave the game looking down in the dumps.

Once again criticism is heaped on Pep, just as it had been after the defeats against Augsburg and Dortmund. A few papers even started predicting the demise of a certain playing style. Franz Beckenbauer had this to say on Sky Germany: ‘Possession is meaningless if you give away chances. We should be happy that Madrid only managed to score one goal.’

But Pep also received messages of support, one of which, an SMS from a Barça player, reads: ‘Pep, you can be very proud of your team. Very few teams could have done what you managed to do at the Bernabéu.’

Bayern had played well, but they hadn’t achieved enough accuracy or efficacy in their finishing. However, in the heat of the moment, the knee-jerk reaction seemed to offer a totally different analysis and left players, press and supporters feeling depressed and pessimistic. This negativity would play a decisive role in the disastrous mistakes Guardiola would make in his strategy for the return leg.

In reality, Bayern had played extraordinarily well although their finishing had been very poor. Despite the visitors’ shortcomings on the night, all the commentary focused on Benzema’s goal, as well as Ronaldo and Di María’s two chances. There was very little appreciation of the domination and character shown by Bayern in one of the greatest sporting theatres in the world. This was a serious error of judgment.

Simultaneously, the culture shock between Pep’s game and traditional German football was becoming apparent.

‘I understand that this style of game is not part of German football culture,’ he explained at dinner after the match. ‘People should know that I do understand. In Germany clubs like to play a style of football that’s very different from my own and no doubt people prefer Madrid or Dortmund’s game. But guys, Bayern chose me. I am making compromises between my ideas and German football but at the end of the day it’s the players who matter. And I’ll tell you something: the players support my ideas.’

You can interpret this clash of culture negatively or positively, but it is a reality. If the Bundesliga is characterised by excellent counter-attacking and direct, fast, vertical football, then Guardiola’s model is indeed a complete contradiction of that. His positional play is based on unified forward movement and winning zonal superiority further up the pitch, like two Alpine climbers, roped together, moving up a mountain stage by stage and with complete co-ordination. It’s a philosophy which allows you to re-start from the back again if one route forward, one movement, ends up blocked. It doesn’t matter how many consecutive passes it takes to make the rival disorganised – you have to keep passing. It was inevitable and natural that comparisons were being made between this and the traditional German model.

After dinner at Madrid’s Intercontinental Hotel, Rummenigge and Matthias Sammer join the technical team at their table and try to raise the coach’s spirits. They are worried that he seems so low and urge him not to abandon his ideas. They have full confidence in him and his players, and in the game plan which has taken them this far. They reiterate that the club is determined to support his ideas and wants to develop them even further over the next few years.

Pep, Domènec Torrent and Carles Planchart spend the next few hours dissecting the match and discussing the best way to approach the return leg. The coach reckons it might be a good idea to start with three central defenders at the back and populate the middle of the pitch in order to dominate and reduce the chances of Madrid scoring a killer away goal. They work until 3.48am and in the end Pep asks Torrent to ensure that he doesn’t change his mind, no matter what happens. Pep knows exactly how he wants to play and doesn’t want to change his plans.

Guardiola is not down because of the score or as a result of the criticism. The truth is that he has just received a call from a doctor informing him of the precarious state of Tito Vilanova’s health.

61

‘A COMPLETE FUCK-UP.’

Munich, April 29, 2014

‘I GOT IT wrong man. I got it totally wrong. It’s a monumental fuck-up. A total mess. The biggest fuck-up of my life as a coach.’

Pep comes into his office in the Allianz having just done the press conference during which he has publicly assumed total responsibility for the catastrophe. Real Madrid have wiped the floor with Bayern in the Champions League semi-final, a game which will stay with Guardiola for the rest of his career. The 4-0 home defeat is the worst of his professional life and the biggest trouncing Bayern have ever received in a European competition. His team has been pummelled into submission and totally humiliated in their own stadium by the team who will take the European title from them a few weeks from now.

Bayern had conceded only two goals direct from corner kicks all season: today Sergio Ramos makes it three, rising majestically above the Bavarian defence in the 16th minute. Pep’s team are on the ropes. It’s the start of a debacle.

This season Bayern haven’t conceded a single goal from an indirect free-kick. Not one. But in the 20th minute Di Maria delivers, Pepe flicks it on with his head and Ramos, again, beats Neuer, taking advantage of the fact that Dante is badly positioned. Fifteen minutes later Ronaldo adds another from a counter-attack which begins when Ribéry loses the ball. And then, just to round off a dark, dark night for the holders, they concede only their second goal all season from a direct free-kick. Again, it is Ronaldo who shoots hard and low whilst the Bayern wall jumps. A bitter moment. Humiliation complete.

The fact that Madrid have scored three of their four goals from set plays could give a false impression. Certainly, this is completely unexpected. Until this point Bayern have been the most reliable defenders of set plays anywhere in Europe, statistics which leave no room for doubt about the excellence of their organisation and preparation. For context, the mighty Juventus have run away with the Italian title with a Serie A record of 102 points but only after conceding 10 times from corners and free-kicks.

However, getting bogged down in an analysis of the goals fails to give a full picture of the reasons for a defeat primarily caused by serious errors of judgment on Guardiola’s part. And we need to go back one week, to the previous Thursday morning, to get to the root of the problem. The scene is a private room in Madrid’s Hotel Intercontinental, where Bayern have enjoyed their traditional post-match dinner. The meal has finished and all but three tables lie empty. The remaining diners include members of the club’s press department, a group of Bayern’s sponsors and, at the third table, Pep and his assistants.

The group has already diagnosed the problems at the root of their 1-0 defeat at the Bernabéu and are proud of the way the players have imposed themselves in this arena by sticking to the game plan. They are also, however, well aware of the fact that their men are below par and have struggled against a defensive line-up made up of well-organised, super-talented players who defend as a unit almost to perfection. Right now, Guardiola is facing one of the most common dilemmas in a football coach’s life: how do you attack effectively in such tight space?

Often the suggested solution in this situation will be to shoot powerfully at goal. Bayern shot at goal 18 times at the Bernabéu – twice as many times as Madrid. Another will be to get crosses into a centre-forward in the box. Bayern put 31 crosses into the box – three times Madrid’s tally.

The reality of football is that using Guardiola’s type of positional play against a team which defends deep and well, demands not only high-quality preparation but also a touch of individual creativity. In other words, in this kind of difficult, frustrating situation, it is usually down to the talent of a top player to make the breakthrough. Unfortunately, during the game, of all Bayern’s forwards, only Arjen Robben has been on his game. Either they haven’t managed to dribble past their markers or have failed to get the right shot away, because they are blocked by the centre-halves.

At 3am on Thursday, April 24, Pep is considering the obvious fact that Madrid will shut up shop when they visit the Allianz for the second leg and that he will be counting on all the same weapons as in the first game. These include Robben, who is in fine form, Ribéry, who is mentally blocked and pained by his loss of form, Mandžukić, who had managed to get on the end of only one of Bayern’s 15 corner kicks in the Bernabéu, and Müller, with his anarchic movement. The coach also has Garry Kasparov’s words ringing in his ears: ‘Remember, Pep, you don’t win games just because you’ve moved your pieces to the front.’

It is during this early-hours reflection on what he has just seen that Pep decides to play the return leg with a 3-4-3 formation. With three central defenders, two full-backs pushed up into the midfield next to the creative midfielders and Götze as one of the two strikers, so that he can add superiority in midfield by dropping back to help in the middle of the pitch. It’s a 3-4-3 which can be changed to a basic 3-5-2 with minimal alteration. Theoretically good for defending against the counter-attacks which, Pep is convinced, will feature heavily in Madrid’s game. But it should also allow Bayern to dominate the middle of the pitch, to keep the ball and not to get log-jammed in and around the Madrid penalty area.

It’s then that I overhear Guardiola telling Torrent: ‘Domè, don’t let me change my mind. This is the only way to go.’

Then, on the flight back to Munich, Pep changed his mind. Reflecting on the fact that the team had last practised a three-man defence in December, the coach realised that there was very little time to prepare his players. Added to this, Javi Martínez had not only just recovered from a bad bout of gastroenteritis, but was also suffering from tendinitis in both knees. There was no way he was going to make it through 90 minutes against Madrid. The coach decided to leave the 3-4-3 for next season and by the time the plane touched down in Munich Pep had switched to a 4-2-3-1. This formation had worked well in Bundesliga games and would give his men superiority in the midfield. What’s more, it was a system they were completely familiar with and would allow him to use both Ribéry and Götze. If only he could do something to get Ribéry back to his best.

On Friday, April 25, Pep addressed his squad briefly. ‘I’ll be eternally grateful for all you did in the Bernabéu. You showed enormous courage and played the kind of football I want to see. I’m proud of you all.’

This was also the day Tito Vilanova passed away, a desperately sad day for his family, FC Barcelona, their supporters and all his friends. The world of football shared their grief and for Pep, Torrent, Planchart, Estiarte and Buenaventura, who had been part of Tito’s life over so many years, it was a devastating blow.

The home game against Werder Bremen on Saturday was tough. Bayern responded to the tragic news by taking steps to protect their coach. Releasing a statement of condolence in both German and Catalan, the club organised a minute’s silence in the stadium where all the players were wearing black armbands. Pep struggled to focus on the game and jumped to his feet only in the 70th minute to hug Ribéry, and tell him how well he had done in the centre-forward position.

Although Werder Bremen managed to pull ahead on two occasions through well-executed counter-attacks, Bayern finished the game with a 5-2 victory and the happy news that Ribéry seemed to be rediscovering his form. Robben had played for only 15 minutes, but put away the fifth goal with his first touch, causing Pep to make a mental note to continue to edge the Dutch striker towards the centre-forward position and away from his normal role on the wing.

That night the coach dined out with friends but his mind was elsewhere. From time to time he pulled out photos showing himself and Tito together, his favourite having been taken in Atlético Madrid’s Vicente Calderón dressing room. In the picture the two men are discussing their plans for the game. All in all it was a strange evening, during which they toasted Tito and discussed almost every subject under the sun except football. Pep had other things on his mind.