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Pep Guardiola has not been ‘found out’ by Premier League football

Among the less considered and patient areas of football, which is to say, almost all of football, there is a consensus forming around Pep Guardiola. Worryingly for Guardiola, he has been found out, and there are even murmurs that the man is a fraud. There are few reasons why his previously understood genius is, in fact, a mistake by those who simply are too foolish to be convinced by Champions League teams and the very best team to have been assembled, ever, by a first-time coach.

The evidence is there, obviously. At Barcelona, of course Guardiola succeeded - he had Lionel Messi, the best player in the world. How hard could a job be, it is reasoned, if you can rely on a genius to put you a goal to the good regardless of circumstances. When millions of pounds and Spanish tax breaks are thrown your way, even Ronald McDonald could have pulled off the double now and then.

And then, at Bayern Munich, we have his sarcastic applause, his screaming at doctors, and his failure to win a Champions League in any of his three years with the club. More than at Barcelona, he also had the advantage of managing in a league where the only real competitor was engaged with itself in pulling off a spectacular collapse - engineered by Bayern’s own transfer interventions on the team - and a gradual rebuilding job. It would only be an absolute Stuart Pearce who could fail in such circumstances.

The problems can be extrapolated and seen in the light of Manchester City now. All the signs of Guardiola’s weaknesses are finally writ large, and we can now doubt what will happen at the Etihad, but also that everything that came before it is apparently flawed.

For the googly-eyed strutting in the Bayern technical area, we can now see the frantic ironic cheering of the referee, reminiscent of his unconcealed anger with the doctors at Bayern Munich. His beard has gone from salt-and-pepper to haggard in a few months, and he is looking vulnerably, rather than confidently, fully bald. Where once he was chatty and gregarious in post- and pre-match interviews, he now answers journalists’ stupid questions with barely hidden (and absolutely justified) contempt. Just as when he effed and jeffed about being the champ at Barcelona when Jose Mourinho had taken up residence in his psyche.

If you want to see it, it’s all there. If you want to see anything when you’ve already got an opinion ready to trot out, given the scrutiny managers are under these days, and the details gleaned from even short careers, you can recall a few details to formulate a compelling echo. So, yes, perhaps Guardiola is at the toughest point of his career, and to some, they might even consider this the time that he is being found out (since he was last found out by not winning the Champions League with Bayern Munich). Or, perhaps there is a more likely explanation.

While it’s true that Barcelona did have Lionel Messi, at the same time Cristiano Ronaldo - his equal for much of the period - was at Real Madrid. If you accept that they essentially are as good as one another, tilting towards your personal favourite, then the decisive factor is the team around them. It was Guardiola who took a misfiring Barcelona side, gutted it and refreshed it with (back then) a necessary confidence mixed with a lack of arrogance. It was Guardiola who developed a system that could suffocate all but the very best teams, and also give those worthy opponents only a rare glimpse of victory. Of course, because of the financial advantages, and the luck of having players like Andres Iniesta, Xavi and Messi on hand, it made beating the rest of La Liga pretty simple, he was able to focus on building the highest achieving side in the world. Look at how other managers have fared across the world in the same period - none of them had hinted they could have done the same. The most enduring manager, Alex Ferguson, used the same period to run on fumes after a self-inflicted budget cut. He would not have equalled Guardiola’s achievements.

At Bayern, there are some valid criticisms of his time. By poaching players regularly from Borussia Dortmund, coupled with the life expectancy of teams topping out at a few years in most cases, Guardiola oversaw a period in Germany where he had no serious opposition. The record books don’t require an explanation in the footnotes as they did for Inter’s victories a few years ago, but winning the Bundesliga was the minimum his employers and others expected.

The problem, here, is that the differentiator between the minimum and the maximum is built on an exceptionally difficult task: to win the Champions League. This was a period when Real Madrid, Juventus and Barcelona remained brilliant, and when English teams would

occasionally remember they were meant to be good. It is a surprise that Guardiola didn’t win the Champions League, but given the vagaries of knockout football and the strength of the competition, it is no failure. The team he built at Bayern was still close to great, and still played football that no other side was capable of. Yes, he had money to spend, but given the rest of Europe’s top clubs did too, that’s no reason to criticise.

Then, we come to City. At Bayern and Barcelona, there were only a couple of weak links. At Manchester City, those he inherited were all of the defence, most of the midfield, and essentially everyone in the squad except Fernandinho, Sergio Aguero and possibly David Silva. He has bought well, largely, and Claudio Bravo deserves time to settle before any conclusion is drawn about his Barthezism. John Stones has the talent of almost any young central defender who can pass - that he is often terrible at actually defending. At his age, given Guardiola will be here for years yet, that doesn’t really matter.

It has been forgotten by some that even with a patchy squad, he has had a team on such good form that journalists waxed hyperbolic on the Sunday Supplement and their weekend written onanism. Less than a month ago they beat Barcelona 3-1. Raheem Sterling and others have improved markedly from their time under Manuel Pellegrini. But we should be reasonable - the squad is nowhere near the quality of Bayern’s or Barcelona’s. With the sheer quality of football that he managed to produce elsewhere, Guardiola hasn’t been found out. He’s just been in England for six months. He is not a magician, he needs time, trust and money. A defeat to Chelsea and some recent struggles have not changed that.