Systemic flaws of Guardiola’s City keep Champions League out of reach

Author, Barney Ronay. PHOTO/COURTESY 

What you need to know:

  • Lack of a pure centre-forward hurt Pep’s Man City against Real Madrid.

Hello darkness my old friend. As Pep Guardiola walked on to the pitch at the final whistle in the Bernabéu, a familiarly skinny-legged figure, that gleaming bald pate looking terribly tender under the hard white lights, still dressed head to toe in tailored black like a celebrity magician, or a university lecturer on his way to a funeral, it was hard not to feel the pathos of the moment.

Guardiola shook hands, patted his players and said something to the referee. He lingered near the centre circle, facing down the waves of triumphalism from the seats, in an arena where this really is personal, where Guardiola stands as a gargoyle of deep tribal rivalries.

Often managers use that post-match lull as a buffer before their media duties, a moment to compose their thoughts and prepare a face to meet the faces. This was a crushing night for Guardiola, one of those moments around which a career is defined, horizons reeled in. But City have another game on Sunday, at Newcastle, with another prize on the line.

A little later he would tell his press conference that he had at no point seen defeat coming, or had any idea Real Madrid were capable of turning a game like this. Really? Because it was out there in plain sight. In the press seats one Spanish football correspondent had flagged up that defeat was coming to Manchester City even as they dominated possession early on, growing ever more certain of Madrid’s eventual victory as Riyad Mahrez put City 1-0 up on the night.

And while this may be a familiar pattern for those who have studied this Madrid team at close range, the question remains: how did City manage to lose this game? There will be talk of magic, of Madrid’s own sun king powers. There is no doubt that the Bernabéu will stretch you thin, will test your upstart nerve.

PSG collapsed under that gaze. Chelsea came here and won but somehow still lost, or lost just enough.
This was of course Madrid’s win more than City’s defeat, carried off with thrilling, nerveless precision. But the fact remains, it also raises some very difficult questions for Guardiola.

Madrid will seek out your limitations, and will jump on them gleefully. What they found in this City team wasn’t the standard errors of poor planning or bungled execution, but something more systemic, flaws built into the model.

There is an annual spring pantomime around Guardiola’s team selection. What will he do? Will he jam a screwdriver into his own fusebox again? Or try to play the piano in a pair of boxing gloves? But there was none of that here. Guardiola picked his best team, and at times that best team looked like what it is, a beautifully fluid thing utterly committed to its patterns and rhythms.

But there are limitations here too. Guardiola has been feted, rightly, as the best pure coach in the world. He misses nothing in preparation. He knows, to an unguessable depth of detail, the textures and patterns the rest of us simply watch from the sidelines. This is what makes his willingness to accept his team’s weaknesses so fascinating.

Why didn’t City win? Because they kept on refusing to kick or head the ball into the goal, missing at least eight very good chances in a tie they lost by one goal. This is not bad luck or an off-day. This is profligacy by design. It is still startling that Guardiola’s squad doesn’t contain a single player whose chief skill, whose specialism, is scoring goals.

And yes, City function so well as a team precisely because they don’t play with an orthodox striker. It is the overload in midfield that allows them to create all these chances in the first place. The system works. But pragmatism is also a strength, and that lack of cutting edge, of a one-punch knockout artist, while intellectually uninteresting to Guardiola, is a weakness in these moments.

Barney Ronay is chief sports writer for the Guardian. This article is abridged