Pep Guardiola’s no-win situation will define ‘naive’ Man City’s season

If the most obvious way to look at Pep Guardiola’s record is to survey his medal collection, there is an alternative approach: look at what he could have won. The Manchester City manager has a lone FA Cup to his name and, as he will soon face a sixth semi-final, he has ample experience of reaching Wembley, if not of prevailing there in this competition.

“I am a failure in the FA Cup,” said Guardiola, borrowing from his rhetoric about the Champions League, mockingly trying to pre-empt his critics and, again, invoking Julia Roberts, the Oscar-winning actress who may be bemused to discover she is becoming a staple of City press conferences; go back to the early 2000s and they were about Eyal Berkovic more than Erin Brockovich. But Guardiola meant part of it seriously.

His City have excelled in most types of matches. Except two, perhaps: the Champions League final – which, as he has still only reached one, represents a small sample size – and the FA Cup semi-finals. “The worst games we have played is always semi-final of FA Cup at Wembley,” said Guardiola. “Never we were [good] there. Our performances were really poor every time; even the year we won we struggled.” In 2019, Gabriel Jesus’ early header took City past Brighton, but the six-goal salvo came instead against Watford in the final.

Perhaps it is not just a quirk, an oddity camouflaged by Guardiola’s more famous inability to win the Champions League with City. It is hard to brand it a Wembley jinx when his side have a history of lifting the Carabao Cup there. More pertinently, it is an April issue, a problem of competing on all fronts. Guardiola is a specialist in extending seasons to the business end but there is a reason why no one has ever done the quadruple, and why Liverpool deserve credit for coming closer than anyone had before last year. There is often a case that something has to give. For City, deliberately or otherwise, it can be the FA Cup. “The last years it always came before or after the Champions League quarter-final and we travelled,” Guardiola said.

Now a semi-final against Sheffield United is trapped by twin legs of a Champions League quarter-final with Bayern Munich. Rest and rotate and Guardiola could field a weakened team. Don’t and some of his premier players may be mentally or physically fatigued. It may be the no-win situation for the manager who doesn’t win FA Cup semi-finals.

Last year’s loss to Liverpool came three days after a 0-0 draw with Atletico Madrid in Spain. Guardiola left Ederson, Ruben Dias, Rodri, Ilkay Gundogan and Kevin de Bruyne on the bench at Wembley and then left them there. The 2021 semi-final defeat to Chelsea was three days after a quarter-final away win over Borussia Dortmund. Ederson, Kyle Walker, John Stones, Bernardo Silva, Gundogan, Phil Foden and Riyad Mahrez dropped out of the team. In 2019, the games were in a different order: City beat Brighton before losing to Tottenham in Europe, with De Bruyne demoted against Spurs.

Guardiola’s other semi-finals came in different circumstances: a 2017 loss to Arsenal more than a month after they were knocked out of Europe, a 2020 defeat to Mikel Arteta’s Gunners when, after football’s three-month shutdown, Champions League games were postponed until August. But whereas Guardiola has won 73 percent of his other games in charge of City, his success rate in FA Cup semi-finals only stands at 20 percent. The elevated nature of teams who reach that far is part of the story. City’s shortcomings is another part.

“To play the semi-finals, you have to be ready,” Guardiola reflected. “It’s so important. We’ve played naively, no good. Three-zero [down] against Liverpool… I know they’re a good team but 3-0 at half-time? When we lost against Arsenal in Mikel’s first season [in 2020], it was really bad. Hopefully this time we can behave as who we are. It’s not about reaching the final, I just always had the feeling that we didn’t compete, we were not there, we were not hungry enough.”

If that first half was, along with the following game against Manchester United, when Liverpool arguably peaked last season, there can be a difference with most of City’s European exits. They tend to be a remarkable array of hard-luck stories and near-misses whereas, as Guardiola readily admitted, they have not performed near their potential in FA Cup semi-finals. A manager accused of overthinking may have hampered his cause: selecting a second-choice goalkeeper at Wembley, particularly Zack Steffen, has tended to backfire.

Guardiola is increasingly defined by Champions League disappointments, to accompany his twin triumphs. Talk of his six semi-final defeats are likelier to reference Barcelona’s exits to Inter Milan and Chelsea, Bayern Munich’s hat-trick of disappointments against Real Madrid, Barcelona and Atletico and City’s loss to Real Madrid last season. They had the air of drama on an epic scale. They almost certainly hurt more. But a manager who has won more than virtually anyone else has also accumulated more semi-final setbacks than most.