Whether managing expectations or containing his own excitement, it is clear few respect the Champions League like Pep Guardiola
The Catalan coach oozed respect for Lyon and the Champions League in his post-match press conference, simultaneously emphasising how hard a competition it is to win and revealing how much he would love to do so again
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Your support makes all the difference.Pep Guardiola hardly gets more impassioned in press conferences than when he is explaining how difficult and important the Champions League is.
He has won it twice, remember, though not since 2011. But he can still be seen as one of a select few who understand the competition and what it takes to conquer it, as if lifting that big-eared trophy is the football equivalent of scaling Everest. Now he can wisely warn the world of its true nature, and why to beat it you first of all have to respect it.
That has been his tone all season and so it was again on Monday night. Guardiola had just seen his City team put in one of their worst performances of the season, outplayed by Lyon and lucky to scrape a 2-2 draw . But for him this was proof that his warnings of the strength of Champions League opposition were right. And that those who said this competition would be a stroll were naively wrong.
“Today the Champions League showed me again it is another different competition,” Guardiola started his press conference. “Especially for one reason: the players are better. Here, when you press, they don’t lose the ball, they play an extra pass, an extra pass. They are strong in the air, on set pieces, defensively, on the counter-attack. That is why when people say it is easy for Manchester City in the Champions League, you cannot imagine how confused people are.”
It feels as if they are Guardiola’s real targets: the people who claim that City should be battering everyone they meet in Europe just because they are Premier League champions. That may be a straw man, but for Guardiola it is still an important one. And he truly comes alive when he gets to talk in detail about how this competition is harder than it looks.
“Words are words. Before, people said it would be easy when the draw is made. But these people never saw one game of Lyon, never saw one game of Hoffenheim, never saw one game of Shakhtar.” Building up a head of steam, Guardiola then pointed to the fact that one of Napoli, Liverpool or PSG will be knocked into the Europa League, as will either Tottenham Hotspur or Inter Milan. Picking up Shakhtar again as an example, he pointed with evangelical enthusiasm to how many good Brazilian players they have and the difficult test they gave Roma in the last-16 of last season’s competition.
“I have more experience than some people,” he said, fairly enough. “This competition is completely different. Today there are good managers everywhere, good players everywhere, young players.”
But because Guardiola could frame Lyon as such a strong team, he could sell City’s achievement in qualifying from this group with one game left as a big one. He described Lyon as “one of the strongest teams I ever faced”, the same words he has used about plenty of European opposition before. And of the fact that City are now through, and will be in the draw for the last 16, he could not have been happier. “Qualifying for the last 16 is the happiest day between August and December,” he said. “Because we can now play in the Premier League and the cups and prepare ourselves for February.”
This is a theme now for Guardiola. He talks up the competition, points to Ciy’s lack of achievement in it, and says how even reaching the early stages of the knock-out rounds is a big success for the club. He talks up City’s opponents, so even as his team get to new heights in the Premier League he does not want them to be seen as big favourites in Europe. And he tries to minimise talk of City winning the competition, because he knows how difficult it is to do.
Maybe he is playing a clever expectations game, knowing that he does not want to build up hopes of City’s chances of winning the Champions League, trying to pretend that the best team in the world can somehow still be an underdog. He does not want to over-promise and under-deliver, especially given how hurtful it was at Bayern Munich that he assembled the best team in Europe but never even reached the final.
Or maybe that is reading too much politics and manipulation into his tactics in press conferences. Because when he gets going, about the way that Lyon defend, or Hoffenheim set up in Germany, or the individual quality that Shakhtar have, he does not sound like a man playing a game. He sounds more enthused than ever before, like a religious man just trying to convince his audience that he has seen the light and that they should too.
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