“We have to be patient,” said Guardiola, with a hoarse voice, a frown, and the gestural tension of great eves. The Manchester City coach delivered one of his most repeated speeches in the conference room of the Istanbul Olympic Stadium, not always with success. In the second Champions League final of his career away from Barça, the coach once again faces a team that defends itself with five defenders and deploys quickly on the counter with two full-backs, two midfielders and two attackers who pose a constant threat against turnovers. When in doubt, the crucial dilemma arises: prioritize keeping the ball to avoid counterattacks or emphasize the rhythm of movement to prevent the opponent from asserting himself in his trench? The message of caution naturally tends to tip the scales in the first direction. For teams that make attacking a fanatical bet, like City, patience can translate into virtue or poison.
There are coaches who, in order to activate all the alerts, warn their players that they must go out on the field as if they were losing 0-1. Guardiola launched a message of calm. “In principle, I don’t think doing whatever you want is the best way to approach the finals,” Guardiola warned. “You have to be stable, stick to the plan, defend well, attack with a lot of control, and be patient. The most important thing in this type of match is to think that if we go 0-0 we are not losing. For Italian teams, going 0-0 is equivalent to winning the game. But 0-0 is a tie. They are not winning. We have to have stability. Have rhythm and at the same time be balanced, and in bad moments take a step forward”.
The match preparation model Italian it is older than the blackboards. Experience indicates that every minute that passes without conceding a goal will exponentially increase the chances of victory for the team that gives up control of the ball. It is empirically proven after decades of trials. The greatest expenditure of energy, physical and mental, falls on the team that needs to handle the ball, forced to constantly exercise precision to avoid increasingly threatening errors. If City players take the field without being fully aware that they will have to live on the edge, they will expose themselves to setbacks that they cannot get out of without an adrenaline overdose. Patience usually saves risks and turnovers. But neither produces adrenaline nor increases aggression. Ancelotti knew it, who rubbed his hands when he heard that “patience” preceded Guardiola’s messages on the way to the first leg of the semifinals, in Chamartín.
The report that Carlo Ancelotti received from Manchester City before the first leg, at the beginning of May, gave the Italian coach hope. According to sources close to Madrid, the news from the rival’s headquarters indicated that Guardiola would prepare a game more focused on control than risk, avoiding vertical passes if the players did not see them absolutely clearly and giving priority to safety passes. Without breaking lines. Avoiding kickbacks was the slogan that weighed the most in the English dressing room. “Patience” was the ringing word. Exactly the kind of scenario that suited Madrid, in the opinion of Ancelotti, who understood that his players would better resist lateral tilting than the forward-backward-forward runs, typical of high-paced matches. The lactic acid of the accelerated transitions would destroy Benzema, Modric and Kroos, according to all the calculations made.
Guardiola’s patient approach in Madrid, which ended 1-1, gave the Madrid players confidence and reaffirmed Ancelotti’s idea in the same way that he alerted the City coaches in the second leg. If Madrid disintegrated in 40 minutes in Manchester, it was because City played with anything but patience. His players lavished themselves on exchanges and the filtered passes, the speed of circulation and the dizzying transitions multiplied. The inaccuracies, which there were, in the long run favored the most daring team. City didn’t just win 4-0. He made the most perfect match for a Guardiola team in the Champions League since 2011.
“Lots of rhythm but…”
Now Guardiola faces another adversary that closes in his field. He must decide if he plugs his team through safe circulation or through aggressive drafting. “What I’m trying to do is understand the game we have to play,” he said Tuesday. “We will encounter many, many difficulties. It is not easy to attack Inter’s defensive system. We have to play with a lot of rhythm but with a little patience. We cannot solve the plays with two or three passes, we have to know the tempo, the exact rhythm. This is the most important thing in this type of match because the longer time passes without us scoring, we can become a little more anxious and that can be a problem”.
The rhythm is the question. The fine line that each of the coaches who bet on ultra-attacking football walk, the switch that turns the soul of their teams on or off, is always reduced to the same elementary dilemma: how, when, and where to pass the ball. Pep Guardiola’s great decision on the threshold of becoming the greatest coach of all time, the only one who has been able to build two legendary teams, or the only one who has come close.
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