Pep Confidential (7 page)

Pep still wants a private chat with two of his players. The first is Pierre-Emile Højbjerg, a midfielder who made his debut for the first team in April 2013 aged only 17. Albert Celades, a former Barça and Real Madrid player and currently the Spanish Under-21 coach, has prepared a detailed report on the youngster for Guardiola, in which he describes Højbjerg as a diamond in the rough. Guardiola has watched the player carefully during this first session and at the end puts a hand on his shoulder. The coach intends to invest time and effort in refining and correcting the young Dane’s performance. This will start with intensive sessions over the next four weeks and then more sporadically throughout the season. He will set about teaching him all the tricks of the trade which he himself, having played in the same position, learned as a youngster.

During the stretching and proprioception exercises which mark the end of the session and are combined with some gentle abdominal work, the players sit around the centre circle. Pep grabs the opportunity to have a one-to-one with Franck Ribéry. Today’s exchange sets the tone for the rest of the season and their mutual admiration is immediately obvious. Pep is impressed and fascinated by the attacker’s talent and the Frenchman believes that under Pep’s guidance his own professional development is about to take another massive leap forward. It is not just that the two men get on well. They dazzle each other. Despite this it will be months before the two begin to actually understand each other. And not just because of the language barrier. Today, as the rest finish off their stretching exercises, Pep asks Ribéry if he would be comfortable playing in central attack. Ribéry does not understand. The Catalan coach has become accustomed to Leo Messi playing in the ‘false 9’ position. A striker who does not only prowl the penalty box but plays much deeper and who improvises when to arrive around the edges of an attack. One who attacks the zones in which the opposition centre-halves work, but without them being able to patrol him. For Guardiola the ideal striker doesn’t work permanently in the box, instead he arrives there at the culmination of a collectively-constructed attack.

Pep intuitively understands that Ribéry has the potential to become a formidable presence down the middle, but the French winger cannot yet visualise what his coach wants. It will take both time and passion before Ribéry mutates into the central attacker Pep is looking for.

Guardiola may not have much time to spare these days, but no one could doubt his passion. It is there in his face as he signs hundreds of shirts for fans the length and breadth of the Allianz Arena, patently surprised and moved by the warmth of their reception. He is back. Football is coursing through his veins once more and no problem seems insurmountable. At his side, Domènec Torrent speaks in English and Hermann Gerland responds in German. Over the coming months it will be vital for the two men to understand each other.

As the day draws to a close, Lorenzo Buenaventura is the last to leave. For the rest of the season he will make it his business to arrive first and leave last and the sight of him strolling from the pitch as the lights go out will become a familiar one here at Säbener Strasse.

6

‘LEO, IT’S PEP. CAN YOU COME OVER? NOW, PLEASE.’

Weiden in der Oberpflaz, June 29, 2013

WEIDEN IN DER Oberpfalz is a small town in the Palatinate region of Germany near the border which separates Bavaria and the Czech Republic. It is also the location of Guardiola’s first match as Bayern coach.

It’s midday on Saturday, June 29. So far Pep has had to content himself with just four training sessions, in which several of his youth team players have had a starring role. He has had no choice but to use the youngsters as he waits for the rest of the European champions to join him at pre-season training in Trentino. Only 13 of the squad’s main players will contest this match and the rest of today’s line-up are drawn from the young hopefuls.

It is going to be an easy game. Every season Bayern play a ‘fantasy football’ fixture, known locally as a
traumspiel
, against one of the 3600 supporters clubs in the country. Today the honour has fallen to Weiden–Bayern. It is a huge event for the 41,684 inhabitants and around 11,000, more than a quarter of them, have turned out. It is going to be one big party.

Despite the festive atmosphere, Pep sees this as an opportunity to make his first declaration of intent.

His team will be playing with a sole holding midfielder. One of the many reasons for Jupp Heynckes’ success at Bayern was his use of the double-
pivote
(
doppelsechs
in German) partnership of Bastian Schweinsteiger and Javi Martínez. The two played in the area normally reserved for the No.6 and their role was to close down spaces and break up opposition attacks. Together they were a formidable force and a key part of the team’s treble-winning season.

One of Pep’s first decisions upon arriving at the club was to dispense with this system. During his own playing days, Guardiola played as a sole holding midfielder, positioning himself in front of the defenders and organising the team from there. The position is known at Barça as the No.4. The Argentines call it a 5, and the Germans a 6.

In Spain this position tends to be called the
mediocentro
. It’s the player who takes the ball directly from the defenders or the keeper and, with the whole of the pitch open in front of him, elects how his team’s play re-starts. He’s also the guy charged with cutting out the opposition’s final pass – the one who can avoid the back four paying the consequences of an unstoppable counter-attack. His defensive qualities are essential.

Back in the late 1980s, Guardiola – lean, slow and lacking the powerful physique of a defender – was struggling to make it as a youth team regular when he caught the eye of Carles Rexach, Johan Cruyff’s assistant.

‘Guardiola isn’t getting a game, but he is the best of the youngsters,’ Rexach told his boss. Sure enough Pep, who was already a natural in attack and would quickly evolve into a gifted playmaker, was soon playing for the first team.

On joining, Guardiola was given the No.4 shirt, little knowing that he was about to define that position – that number – at Barça.

Cruyff saw him as a crucial part of his nascent Dream Team, whose mesmerising football would sow the seeds of Barça’s ascendancy for decades to come.

Conscious of his own failings, Pep set out to maximise his talents. Lacking speed himself, he would ensure that the ball circulated at a pace that no player could ever match. Unwilling to risk too many physical tackles, he used his devastating passing to cut through the opposition. As a young player, Guardiola was already forming the football philosophy he would later implement so successfully as a coach; high-speed, attacking football as the best form of defence; effective passing and ball control, and as little hard tackling as possible.

We sat down together one December day in 2013, just after training.

‘Do you think I would have lasted 11 years at Barça if all they were looking for was speed, strength and the ability to score goals?’ In the 385 games he played for Barcelona, Pep scored just 13 goals.

To survive in the jungle of the football world he had had to foster and exploit the natural skills he possessed, rare as they were at that time. He used his personal training regime to develop not just physical strength but technical prowess and was happy to play a supportive role, distributing the ball with deadly accuracy. Pep prided himself on his ability to anticipate the next move even before he had the ball at his feet and delighted in using his passing to trick his opponents and break through their lines.

‘If I had a line of five rivals in front of me, as usual, they’d want to make sure that we could only circulate the ball in a U-like circular movement in front of them – searching from wing to wing for space via the midfield, but never getting any depth or creating any danger. This line of five midfielders would inevitably be tightly pegged to the four defenders behind them – there would be no space between the lines. These two compact lines of opposition obliged me to use space wide in order to avoid danger. I’d use two wingers – making themselves available on each touchline and capable of going deep when it was the right time. The other attackers needed to move between the two lines. To achieve that I had to lead the line of five astray – move it about, shake it up, introduce disorder, trick it into thinking that I was about to go wide again and then – boom! – split them with an inside pass to one of the strikers. And that’s that. They are turned inside out, suddenly having to run towards their own goal. Basically, that’s how I separated my team from others during my career.’

All of this is exactly what Pep wants from his holding midfielder. At Barça he found it in Sergio Busquets and here in Weiden in der Oberpfalz, in late June 2013, it is the young Pierre-Emile Højbjerg he has in his sights.

Pep heard good things about Højbjerg before coming to Bayern and it has taken just a couple of training sessions for him to fall in love with the player who, having started in April under Heynckes, clearly has a dazzling future ahead of him. Højbjerg reads the game brilliantly and has an astonishing ability to break through five players with a single pass. Pep thinks that he may just have found the Busquets of Bayern, although at 17 the young player has a bit of maturing to do. In fact Højbjerg is the only one of the 23 to play the full 90 minutes of this friendly. The game ends with a 15-1 victory and, as expected, their rivals have given them very few problems.

Guardiola’s debut XI consists of Neuer; Lahm, Kirchhoff, Can, Contento; Højbjerg, Schöpf, Strieder; Markoutz, Müller and Rankovic.

But let’s leave Weiden in der Oberpfalz for a moment to talk a little about the idiosyncrasies of football terminology. Every country in the world seems to have its own terms to describe what happens on the pitch. We’ve already seen that a player in the same position will be called a 6 in Germany, a 5 in Argentina and a 4 at Barça, where he will also be known as a
pivote
.

Something similar happens in the numerical sequences which try to indicate the specific positioning of a given player on the pitch.

Guardiola has no time for these schematics and dismisses them as ‘lists of telephone numbers’. One of his mentors, Juanma Lillo goes further: ‘You’ll never see players in those positions, not even when they first come out onto the pitch.’

However, for our purposes and to better explain the point, I’d like to refer to these formations now. Pep’s 4-3-3 in Spain would be a 4-1-4-1 to a German. Two distinct ways of presenting the same formation: four defenders, an organising midfielder, two attacking midfielders, two wingers and, at the point of it all, a striker.

Of course, no match plan could ever convey the complexity of the organisation of a football team. For our purposes, however, when I talk about Guardiola’s Bayern team I will often refer to the 4-3-3 formation.

As expected, Pep played a sole midfielder in his first game. As a player he disliked playing as part of a double-
pivote
because it limited his space on the pitch, and neutralised the effect of his ability to anticipate the next pass. He felt lost and ill at ease and as a coach is reluctant to impose that system on his players. Over time, however, he would rethink this attitude and eventually come up with his own particular version of the position.

Today, Højbjerg plays very well and Guardiola sees something of himself in the young Dane. He likes the way he positions his body when he gets the ball and then feints one way while actually intending to move in the opposite direction. He is convinced that he has indeed found a diamond in the rough. His job will be to polish the player over the next three years (the length of his current contract with Bayern).

Everyone in Weiden is enjoying the celebrations, despite the final score. The young Austrian, Oliver Markoutz, scores the first goal of the Guardiola era, 10 minutes into the game. At half-time the scoreboard shows 0-3, but in the second half the men from the supporters’ club collapse. Bayern’s line-up has some changes. It’s now Starke; Rafinha, Wein, Boateng, Schmitz; Højbjerg, Weihrauch, Kroos; Weiser, Ribéry and Green. In the second half Toni Kroos steals the show, although all the photo opportunities are provided by two youngsters: Patrick Weihrauch, who performs brilliantly and scores four goals, and Julian Green, a lethal presence on the wing, who puts three away. Kroos plays a compact, fluid game and seems as comfortable playing on the left, his preferred side, or the right.

There is no serious opposition, but Pep nonetheless uses the 45 minutes to watch and assess his players. Even before taking over and certainly from the very first training session, Pep’s instincts have told him that Toni Kroos will be a vital part of the motor that drives his team.

Today Franck Ribéry plays as a false No.9. It’s his debut in a position Guardiola developed for Leo Messi and which helped turn the Argentine into the world’s deadliest player. Pep would not claim to have invented the position, but it is one he cherishes and he was certainly responsible for giving it a new lease of life.

The false 9 existed in football as far back as the days when the Argentine Adolfo Pedernera was playing for and leading Máquina de River Plate (1936-1945), although the first player to really make it his own was the Hungarian Nándor Hidegkuti, known for his great exploits in the Hungarian national team of the 1950s, the Magical Magyars. Players such as Alfredo Di Stéfano, Michael Laudrup and Francesco Totti had all been great exponents of the same position but it had fallen out of fashion until May 2, 2009, when Pep Guardiola revived it. The venue was the Santiago Bernabéu stadium, Barcelona against Real Madrid. The two teams were battling it out for the Spanish title (the first of the three consecutive leagues won by Pep with Barça). The scene was set for the Catalan to unleash his secret weapon.

Ten minutes into the game, with the score at 0-0, Pep gave the nod to Messi and Samuel Eto’o. The two players had to swap positions. Eto’o, usually a centre-forward, moved to the right wing and Messi, a right winger, took up position in the centre of the field – but playing deeper, more like an attacking midfielder than a striker. Christoph Metzelder and Fabio Cannavaro, the Madrid centre-backs, were lost. They had no idea how to counteract the change.