Opinion Great expectations of Pep
How much can Guardiola change Bayerns style of play?
How much can Guardiola change Bayerns style of play?
In sport,the word transition usually crops up while describing either a team of young but unproven talents or a successful team that has to rebuild after the loss of an ageing core group. Bayern Munich are neither. They have just been crowned champions of Europe. Only one player from their starting eleven in the Champions League final was in his thirties. And that man,Franck Ribery,had turned 30 only in April.
And yet,at the end of this season,Bayern will be a team in transition. Back in January,they had already announced that Pep Guardiola would replace Jupp Heynckes,68 and presumed to be on the verge of retirement,as their coach.
Heynckes,reportedly,wasnt too pleased with the timing of the announcement. Guardiola,after all,was the most sought-after coach in world football,having won three league titles and two Champions Leagues in four seasons with Barcelona. Speculation over his next destination had begun as soon as hed announced that he was taking a one-year sabbatical from coaching. Bayern and Heynckes were in the middle of an important season; everyone was already looking ahead to the next one.
Since that announcement,Heynckes has forced the world to return to the present. Bayern have won the Bundesliga with a whopping 25-point cushion,and theyve won the Champions League. On the way,they beat Barcelona a Barcelona that was still,in many ways,Guardiolas team 7-0 across two legs.
On Saturday,Bayern play Stuttgart in the final of the DFB Cup. Were they to win,they would become only the seventh team in history,and the first German club,to achieve the treble of European Cup (or,in its current avatar,the Champions League),domestic league and domestic knock-out cup titles in the same season.
Bayern,therefore,are in a situation thats vastly different from Barcelonas when Guardiola became their coach five years ago. Then,Barcelona had finished third in La Liga the preceding season,and had dominated possession while looking sluggish and far from incisive during their semi-final exit against Manchester United in the Champions League. The team clearly needed a shake-up.
Over the course of his first season,Guardiola let go of some of Barcelonas biggest stars,such as Ronaldinho and Deco,promoted a number of players from the clubs youth team,and spent lavish amounts of money on some of Europes finest talents. The style of football he enforced,tiki-taka,became a blueprint for unprecedented levels of domination for both Barcelona and the Spanish national team.
Can Guardiola create a Bayern team that is as dominant? The signs so far are that Bayern could become an unstoppable domestic force. They have already strengthened,while simultaneously destabilising their closest rivals with the acquisitions of Götze and Robert Lewandowski from Borussia Dortmund the second-best team in Germany and in Europe.
These moves have clear and depressing,to some echoes of the summer of 2002,when Bayern took away Michael Ballack and Ze Roberto from Bayer Leverkusen,who,like Dortmund,had just finished runners-up in the Bundesliga and the Champions League. Bayern won four of the next six Bundesliga titles,but that didnt quite translate into European success. It would be silly,therefore,to predict a Bayern hegemony in Europe under Guardiola. No team has ever defended the Champions League title. But Guardiola,who won it twice in three seasons for Barcelona,might just be the man for the job.
In aiming for that unprecedented feat,how much will Guardiola change Bayerns style of play? Football writers have already begun speculating whether he will make Bayern move to the intricate patterns of tiki-taka,and somehow make their players clones of their Barcelona counterparts. Will Javi Martinez,Bastian Schweinsteiger and Toni Kroos become the new Busquets,Xavi and Iniesta? Will his new signing,Mario Götze,duplicate Lionel Messis false-nine role?
The tiki-taka label is a media invention,of course,and all this speculation is predicated on a belief that tiki-taka,in Guardiolas mind,isnt just a style of football but an ideology of how football ought to be played. Its hard to tell if hes really that dogmatic.
Guardiola will know well enough that change can only happen gradually. It took a season and a half before Messi made his metamorphosis from a relatively orthodox winger to an entirely out-of-the-box centre forward. Guardiola will also know that what worked at the Camp Nou might not work as well at the Allianz Arena. But he will be tempted to leave his own imprint on the club. What that will be,and whether it might come at the cost of preserving what made Heynckess team so successful,will be intriguing to watch.
karthik.krishnaswamy@expressindia.com
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