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Journalism of Courage
The last time Manchester City lost five successive games, Pep Guardiola was winding down his playing career in Mexico. The Abu Dhabi takeover was simply a negotiation. The new English rage was Chelsea, their cold-eyed owner, the handsome and brazen manager and his galaxy of young stars. No one noticed City’s losing streak, which stretched to six, under the former England defender Stuart Pearce in 2006. He survived the axe and another year at the then City of Manchester Stadium, a compact and hostile arena.
This time it is different. City is one among Europe’s elites, the most formidable and ambitious dynasty since Sir Alex Ferguson bid farewell to the Old Trafford. Five defeats on the spin has spurred a riot of feeling, from shock to sadism, a sense of schadenfreude and a casket of narrative threads. Whether it’s the beginning of the end, or the end; whether it’s a sign of Guardiola and his team feeling bored, whether all the success has killed their drive, or whether it’s just another slip-up triggered by injury, form and fitness, or have the edifices of the grand City empire begun to crumble. The comment of Bernardo Silva a few weeks ago that the “club is in a dark space” has instigated the conspiracy theorists.
Of all the defeats, the latest, against Tottenham Hotspur, would hurt Guardiola the most. Not because of the scoreline, not because it came at home, but because their opponent outclassed his team in every facet of the game. They were out-thought by an eccentric manager from Down Under, they were out-run and out-muscled on the field by a team that had lost to the promoted Ipswich Town in their last fixture.
Whereas Guardiola had been firmly optimistic after the first four defeats, pessimism is creeping in. “In this moment we are fragile defensively,” he said in the post-game interaction. Injuries, invariably, have dented his team. To say they have missed the vision and sturdiness of Rodri, the Ballon d’Or winner, is an understatement. His value has only magnified in his absence. As severe has been the intermitted injuries to some of his key members such as Kevin de Bruyne, Ruben Dias, Jack Grealish, Jeremy Doku, Ilkay Gundogan, Nathan Ake, Akanji and Phil Foden. Most have retuned but yet not assumed their peak fitness levels.
Some others like Silva and Kyle Walker have looked tired, whereas some of the new recruits such as Matheus Nunes and Savio have not yet teethed into City’s system and syntax. Fatigue too would have kicked in, especially after the Euro and COPA year. It’s the sort of perfect storm—injuries, loss of form, fatigue, an ageing core and speculations on Guardiola’s future as he runs out of contract at the end of this year.
But even a Manchester City-Guardiola crisis fascinates. As though this is just another twist before City twists the knife into their opponents’ back and running away with another league title, come the end of the season. That, this is the low that could soar them to loftier heights. Guardiola himself doesn’t appear too fussed. He is the same as always, angsty on the touchline, candid with the microphone.
The Spaniard has never lost five games at a stretch in his entire managerial career, spanning Spain, Germany and England and that has entered his 17th year. So personally, it’s a peculiar crisis for him.“It always happens one time in your lifetime, right? Always there is a first time,” he said after the Brighton loss in a rather pleasant tone.
It has coincided at a time when he was finessing a team different to any of his previous ones, when he was veering away from the ideologies that had formed and defined him. He has made it evident that he wants a more direct approach from his team. Death by speed displacing death by pass. His recent recruits smack of the paradigm shift. Doku, Savio and Nunes are not the conventional ball-keeping forwards, but those with speed to burn and tricks to showboat. The real sign of change perhaps is Erling Haaland, everything is tweaked to optimise the ludicrous goal-scoring knack of the Norwegian. In another era, Julian Alvarez would have been his front-man. Then, he has Haaland, so why not Haaland? He once moulded the best False Nine in the world out of Messi on the wings; perhaps now he wants to show he could create the best Real Nine too. Guardiola is an idealist, but an iconoclast too.
So how he reverses City’s fortunes would be a compelling narrative, even if it would not define him. But the problem he has with the peculiar personnel at his disposal is that there are too many round holes for square pegs. If he goes for speed, he doesn’t have stability, neither in the midfield nor in the defence. The midfield could be over-run. Mateo Kovacic has a robust passing range but lacks the physicality of Rodri. If he does a double-pivot with Gundogan, the midfield becomes too stifled and slow. City could be caught napping on the counter-attack.
A return to more archetypal Guardiola format—narrow midfield and compact frontline— could potentially work but so far he has not fully reverted to these versions. The hour’s need is not to overanalyse, he asserted. “I would say the mistake is to think too much about analysing what happened and the other mistake would be after eight years changing a lot. You have to [rely] on the simple things that we believe in completely, step by step the players will be back and we will get back to trying to win games. If at the end it doesn’t happen what can we do? More than ever, hopefully. Because I’m hugely optimistic in my life, hopefully they can follow me,” he said.
But with Guardiola, even in bad times, there is always an intrigue, always a belief, rather than hope, that there could be something better still, that it could be just another fresh challenge for Guardiola, seemingly in a quest to find new ways to challenge him.
