Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

by Balague, Guillem

  The Catalan press was encouraging supporters to settle for a draw, trying to manage expectations ahead of a match in which the Barcelona fans were allowing their natural pessimism to creep in and suspect that the worst might happen. But Pep was not only calling the changes on a footballing level, he was transforming the way the culés felt about themselves, restoring their pride and injecting optimism into a culture that always anticipated that things would go wrong for them in the end. On the eve of the game, Pep was having none of this talk of a draw. He was going to the Bernabéu to win: to take the game to the home side and to beat them playing it his way. ‘We won’t speculate or leave it to fate. We will not relinquish all that we have been this year. When we return from the Bernabéu, I want it to have been all about us,’ Pep told his squad.

  If Madrid’s run of form had dictated that the league was going to be decided at the Bernabéu, Barcelona were going to accept the challenge. Their arch rivals were breathing down their necks, piling the pressure on the novice coach and his emerging team; but it was a scenario that Guardiola relished rather than shirked: ‘I want the pressure. It is ours and I want it. And if something happens and we lose, so be it: it is a final and finals should be played with ambition.’

  As the Barcelona players made their way down the tunnel, towards the short flight of steps that would take them up and out on to the Bernabéu pitch, and into a cauldron of noise and unbridled hostility, they had Pep’s final word’s ringing in their ears above the din: ‘We have come here to win! And at the Bernabéu there is only one way of winning: be brave!’

  Earlier that season, in the first Clásico of the 2009 campaign, Guardiola’s Barcelona had beaten Real Madrid 2-0. But the victory had not been as comfortable as the scoreline suggests: Drenthe had a chance to score the first goal before Eto’o and then Messi sealed the win for the hosts. It is still remembered as a special night, not only because it was Pep’s first Clásico as coach, but also because of his reaction to the victory. The expression on Pep’s face told the story – he had momentarily become a player again, basking in the euphoria of an adoring Camp Nou. He could not hide the fact that his eyes had welled up with the emotion of it all, while the enduring image of Víctor Valdés and his coach locked in bear hug summed up the bond that was being forged between this extraordinary group of players and their manager.

  However, if that moment was special, it was merely a warm-up for the performance at the Bernabéu the following May. A night that would surpass all expectations.

  The stifling early summer heat in Madrid that Saturday afternoon was particularly unbearable when the teams arrived at the Bernabéu. Pep’s preparations were complicated by the loss of Rafa Márquez to injury and the impending trip to Stamford Bridge just three days later for the second leg of the semi-finals of the Champions League that would follow a frustrating 0-0 at the Camp Nou. With a win at the Bernabéu significant, but not essential, speculation was rife that Pep might even rest some players with an eye on the game in London.

  No chance.

  Pep had made one thing clear all week: the league was going to be won that night, in the enemy’s backyard. And, to do that, Guardiola selected his strongest line-up available: Víctor Valdés, Abidal, Dani Alvés, Piqué, Puyol, Xavi, Touré, Samuel Eto’o, Henry, Messi and Iniesta.

  Pep had analysed Real Madrid in detail and, an hour and a half before the game, he got Messi, Xavi and Iniesta together: ‘You three against Lass and Gago have got the game. If you do it right, three against two, we’ve beaten them.’ The plan was crystal clear. Lass and Gago were going to find a third man to defend, Messi would position himself as a false striker in between the centre backs and those two.

  Barcelona controlled the game from early on. Twenty minutes into the match, Xavi had a clear shot and Eto’o had another a few minutes later. But Madrid scored first. Higuaín found himself in space, unmarked – and seized his opportunity. Guardiola was undaunted. Barcelona persisted with the game plan. Their manager had made them believe in what they were doing and they just had to go along with it. As Cruyff had told Pep right at the start of the season, and Pep repeated to his pupils: be patient.

  The culés didn’t have to wait long. Almost immediately after Higuaín’s goal, the score was brought level by Thierry Henry. Soon after, Xavi pulled the rabbit out of the hat with a free kick. Before it was taken, the midfielder started making curious hand signals to Puyol, repeating them insistently as if possessed. A second later, he stopped. He turned his head, he seemed to see something that made his mind up definitively and went back to the job at hand, again making those curious hand signals. The next thing, Puyol was leaving the pitch, only to come back on and catch the Real defence unaware. 1-2.

  In the celebrations that followed the goal, the rest of the Barcelona players learnt that Xavi, Puyol and Piqué had been practising that move alone, and that they had kept it a secret until that day. Four years later they would repeat the exact same set piece in South Africa while playing for Spain against Germany, the only goal of the semi-final of the World Cup.

  Barcelona were in charge of the score and the game. Cannavaro and Metzelder did not know what to do. If they both moved forward to try to help Gago and Lass against the three Barcelona players who occupied the central positions, they left their back exposed to the movements of Eto’o and Henry cutting in from the wings. If only one of the two centre backs moved forward, that gave Messi the option of playing a one-on-one with a lot of space against a much slower defence outside their area. Before the match, Juande Ramos had a plan to counter Messi – involving Heinze, the left back – but on the night the Argentinian full back instead had his hands full dealing with Eto’o.

  Xavi, Iniesta and Messi were quick with their decisions and passing, tempting the opponent towards the ball then passing before contact. The game was becoming the perfect example of technique, tactics and belief. It also heralded the beginning of the ‘Messi explosion’ that accompanied his move from the wing to playing as a false number nine. It was a tactical switch that was going to destroy opposition defences across Spain and Europe – and revolutionise world football.

  And the key to all this lay with two gifted and privileged minds of this game, Guardiola and Messi, both of whom understood the importance of positioning and the needs of the individual.

  With Pep’s help and his own intuition, Messi started playing football with an accordion-like movement: the further the ball was away from him, the more distance he would put between himself and the ball. The closer it was to him, the closer he would move to get involved. Messi always wants the ball and in order for him to receive it in the best circumstances, Pep has made him understand that looking for the opposition’s weaker side, where there are fewer opponents, behind the line demarcated by the deep-lying midfielders (pivotes) and distancing himself from the centre backs, the ball will find him. Furthermore, in those areas, he will have a bit of extra space to rev his engine, to work his way up through the gears, before hitting the opposition in full flow. And all this with very little effort: he only needed to work up through the gears when he received the ball. Without it he was allowed to take time to recover, to rest while he played. It sounds simple enough, but in mastering that positioning and timing, Messi has shown a thorough understanding of the game and an ability to learn in record time what many players take years to understand.

  Barcelona grabbed their third just before the break. Messi. 1-3.

  At half-time Guardiola warned his players not to get carried away by the scoreline nor the fact that they had an important match three days later. Madrid had managed much more incredible comebacks in the previous weeks and they were, after all, playing at the Bernabéu.

  The second half kicked off. Madrid scored their second. 2-3.

  It was the moment when many sides would have panicked, allowed the momentum to shift in favour of the hosts. But Guardiola and his Barcelona players were not about to let that happen.

  Thierry Henry made it 2-4.r />
  Then came Barcelona’s fifth. The most magical of them all: Xavi performed a fantastic turn to lose his markers, then passing to Messi who, with a feint, sent Casillas diving to ground prematurely, before slotting home with a shot that passed the helpless keeper. 2-5.

  And then there were six.

  Messi released Eto’o with a ball into space out wide on the right, who fired in a cross that was met by Gerard Piqué. That’s right: a centre half leading a counter-attack when his side had a three-goal lead. 2-6.

  Superiority in midfield, as predicted by Pep, was the key to the game. It was the happiest day of his regime up to that point. The squad celebrated and hugged each other like never before. Xavi remembers all the players bouncing around looking like a bunch of ‘teletubbies’, childish, uninhibited exuberance in victory. Players took photos in the dressing room to immortalise the greatest moment in a century of Madrid–Barça games. It was Barcelona’s very own cannon shot heard all around the world, the moment when the football fans, players and pundits across the globe took notice that something very special was taking place in a corner of Spain.

  In the press room at the Bernabéu, Pep appeared more emotional than ever, truly moved by the historic event that had just taken place. ‘It’s one of the happiest days of my life and I know we have also made a lot of people happy.’

  Iniesta remembers the celebrations well: ‘The craziest, as always, was Piqué, he didn’t stop jumping and shouting. One of his favourite rituals is to connect his MP3 player to the aeroplane’s loudspeaker on the way home and put music on full blast – ‘techno, ska, dance or whatever type of loud music appeals to him at the time.’ Needless to say, the flight back to Barcelona that night was an impromptu Piqué-inspired disco.

  The crowds awaiting the players at Barcelona airport in the early hours of Sunday morning greeted their returning heroes as if they were bringing home the trophy from a major cup final.

  Guardiola, however, had to bring the players back down to earth almost immediately. He knew that he would have to calm everybody down, then pick them back up for another monumental and season-defining challenge: a Champions League semi-final against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge just three days later.

  3

  THE SIX TITLES IN ONE CALENDAR YEAR

  During the four years that Pep Guardiola was in charge of Barcelona he did not give interviews for publication, with the exception of one that was supposed to end up on the history of Brescia DVD and somehow ‘mysteriously’ found its way on to the Italian television channel RAI!

  Talking to Pep for this book was the only way I could open a hitherto closed window on his private world; to reveal what motivates him, what took him to where he is now, what fed his intuition to make the right football decisions; ultimately to try to comprehend what was taking him away from all he adored, or had once adored.

  Before I met him privately, I felt like a naughty kid peering over a high wall to try to catch glimpses of a life, a mind, that, I was certain, was not exactly the same as the one that was discussed frequently and analysed to death. Clearly, as we all know, there are many Guardiolas: the public Pep, the passionate Pep, the fragile Pep, Pep the leader, visionary, role model and so on. In order to convey anything close to the real Pep Guardiola, it was important to try and peel away the layers, to work around the public profile and understand the man behind the finely tailored suits and the cool exterior.

  Typically, meetings with Pep would be a planned twenty-minute chat at the end of a training session. More often than not, the press officer would return eighteen minutes after I’d arrived, with a knock on the door and a ‘do you want a coffee?’, code for: ‘time’s up’! If Pep brushed him off with a ‘don’t worry, we are OK’, it was a small success.

  His private words mould this book. In any case, since the day he took over the first team at FC Barcelona, Pep has done enough talking in front of the press – at his 546 press conferences – to fill an encyclopaedia with his insights. By his own account, he has sat in front of the media for 272 hours, or eleven full days. That amounts to around eight hundred questions a month. Can you imagine? Every single word scrutinised, every gesture picked up on, every utterance interpreted and extrapolated by the world’s press.

  He has been asked if he believes in God, if he writes poetry, about his politics, about the financial crisis and at least a hundred times if he was going to renew his contract (‘although I don’t really care if you do or not,’ one journalist once told him!). The pre-game press conferences, at least half an hour long, always became the story of the day, but there was more to take from them if you were an advanced follower of both the politics within the media and the character himself – you hardly ever got a clue about the team, but if you were intuitive you would find out about Pep’s state of mind.

  So stop leaping around trying to see what’s on the other side of the wall. Take a seat, if you haven’t already, in one of the front rows of today’s empty press conference. You will be the only journalist present. Imagine Pep clutching a bottle of water, hurrying to the front table and eagerly taking his seat, nervously touching the microphone, prepared to offer you an insight into his mind. The answers to many of the questions you’d hope to ask might be revealed in the following paragraphs. Or maybe not. Keep reading and find out.

  The press conference starts now. Pep leans forward into the microphone, and starts to speak:

  ‘When I face the press and the players, there is always an imposing element, almost theatrical, in order to be able to reach them. But in the end I always transmit what I feel. There is an element of shame, of fear, of acting the fool that makes me contain myself a little, then there is what I have learnt from football and the thing is that it scares me to make a statement when I know that the game is uncontrollable, that tomorrow my words could come back to haunt me. That’s why I always search for the element of scepticism, the “je ne sais quoi”, a doubt. That false humility that people always say I have, always giving the players the credit, isn’t because I don’t want to acknowledge my own merits, I must have done something right, it is because I panic about having those words turned on me. Because by doing exactly the same as what I am doing now, I could lose tomorrow. I prefer to be wrong a million times than give my people the impression that I am sure about everything that I am not. Because if I get it wrong tomorrow through doing the same thing as I do now, they’ll say, “You weren’t that clever, how didn’t you see that?”

  ‘I win because I am in a team rich in very good players and I try to make them give their all and out of ten games I win eight or nine. But the difference between winning and losing is so small ... Chelsea didn’t win the European Cup because Terry slipped when taking a penalty, he slipped! I’ve given the players that example a thousand times.

  ‘Three or four books have been written about my leadership strategy. I look at them to discover myself and see if I really do those things, because I don’t know. They come to conclusions about me that I had never even considered.

  ‘Why am I more of a leader than a coach who has been training for twenty years and hasn’t won anything? It isn’t false modesty, I can’t find the reason because I wouldn’t have won trophies if I hadn’t been with Barça.

  ‘The players give me prestige and not the other way around.

  ‘I would go out on to the pitch with the players and go into the dressing room. I’m still very young and there are a lot of things that I would do. I’d go and hug them as a player. But I can’t do that any more.

  ‘How do I exercise my leadership? Why do I tell players one thing or another? Nothing is premeditated; everything is pure intuition with the players at all times. When they lose they are a mess, both those who played and those who didn’t. So, sometimes I turn up and hug one or tell another one something, it is pure intuition. Of the twenty decisions I make each day, eighteen are intuitive, through observation.

  ‘Is that all true? I can’t work solely through intuition, I have to work usin
g my knowledge, I don’t want them to brand me a visionary. Furthermore, if I were I would make my players play in strange positions.

  ‘In the end we do what we can and feel, through our education, we only transmit what we have experienced. There are no general theories that apply to everything. And any one could be valid, what doesn’t work is imposing something that doesn’t work.

  ‘As professional as they are, they are also scared of losing and they look for that figure that gives them the key, that tells them: “Hey, come this way ...” this is what we coaches have to do. We have to transmit trust and security in all the decisions we make.

  ‘That trust, security and sincerity are the fundamental pillars for a good coach. The players have to believe in the manager’s message. He must always speak to the player fearlessly, sincerely and tell him what he thinks. Without deceiving him.

  ‘The players put you to the test each day; that’s why it is very important to be convinced about what you want and how you want to put it across. They are aware that luck is an important factor in the game, but they want to feel that the coach is convinced and defends the decisions he has made. The day we played against Espanyol at home (1-2), I got it wrong at half-time. A couple of weeks later, I mentioned it to them. They know that we aren’t perfect, but we are humble and sincere.

  ‘I don’t know in what aspect we are good coaches. We haven’t invented or revolutionised anything. The tactical concepts that we apply have been developed here, we have been taught them. The secret is in the details and in observing a lot. You have to pay a great deal of attention, constantly, to what happens every day, more so than to the weekend’s game: we are always aware of every aspect, of a player’s moods, their expressions, of thousands of almost unfathomable things that could make a difference. Observation is key.