Football
Guardiola tore Real Madrid to pieces at the level of ideas. Here are the main principles of his football
In the current Manchester City, everyone can do everything. Ancelotti simply did not find what to answer.
Lure the king to fight in the field
In the return home match of the semi-finals, Manchester City, the main favorite of the Champions League, finally broke Real Madrid. This is a forced generational change: Pep’s brutal and beautiful football has shown that the time of Modric and Kroos, and perhaps Benzema, is passing. But what will Mkhitaryan and Dzeko from Inter say to this, for whom the final will also be the last chance for the main European football cup?
Real Madrid in the Champions League in recent years is a symbol of invincibility. A team that knows how to suffer for the sake of victory. She can be outplayed, but she will take her to the end of the match. Guardiola remembered well last year’s semi-finals against Real Madrid and that unprecedented “last” minute of the decisive match in Madrid, which contained three royal goals. This time the decisive game was in Manchester, and Guardiola emphasized the special significance of this factor, which, it would seem, is already secondary to great clubs.
He is also the best coach in the world because he takes his opponents seriously and does not ignore the details. Throughout the match, Guardiola took minutes to turn to the stands and ask them for strength with energetic waves of hands. To say that these walls, dear to Guardiola, helped break Real Madrid, would be too much. But this inflexible king of Madrid had to be lured out of his fortress into an open field, and only there they could give him the last battle. Guardiola used everything, he neglected nothing.
Total Pep
These matches required him to show his art to the fullest. And there was no better moment to finally understand what Guardiola’s football is.
Perhaps, while this is the highest form of expression of the idea of ”total football”, in which everyone can do everything. Guardiola is looking for how to make the most of the team’s resources. It was his goalkeepers who played with their feet without fail in order to become full-fledged field players.
This is Guardiola, realizing that the bulk of game actions are performed in the middle of the field, he came up with the idea of saturating this zone with, in fact, six midfielders, pulling John Stones from the center of defense here. But Guardiola has drawn a definitive division between football and chess: he has no predictably moving pieces. If you see a player on the edge, don’t confuse him with a rook and don’t expect him to move straight back and forth. Guardiola’s pieces move where the meaning of a particular playing moment leads them. The whole difficulty is to teach the team at these moments to move as a whole, and where one left, someone else should appear.
The idea of Guaridola in his base is simple and eternal: everyone comes to this game in order to score a ball into other people’s goals. Even those who later become goalkeepers themselves. Guardiola allows all his players to attack. But he teaches them the obligatory switching to defense when they personally are not aimed at other people’s goals. Your freedom of expression is limited only by team discipline. This is a difficult balance to find, but this is the pinnacle of football art. Therefore, in City, the attacking players know how to defend themselves, and the defensive players always connect to the attack.
In the confrontation with Real Madrid, the players of deep positions began to threaten the gates of Thibault Courtois before anyone else: City’s game seemed to be warmed up by long-range shots from Rodri, Stones and De Bruyne. Then the pressure on Real Madrid was strengthened by the mighty Haaland. And the goals of the first half, which decided everything, were scored by Bernardo Silva, who operates predominantly in the left zone of the opponent’s defense. And there is not a single natural defender who would devote all his time to destruction. For Real Madrid, this is the area where their best attacking players to date, Camavinga and Vinicius, interact. But in the Manchester match, they never got the ball.
The last sand in the hours of Modric, Kroos and Benzema
The tactical genius of Guardiola managed to give out the main chemical reaction and completely dissolve Kroos and Modric in the center of the field – two supporting columns of the Madrid building. The veteran midfielders were torn apart and locked in a fight with City’s superior forces. There were more of them, and they were younger. The game culminated with four consecutive substitutions in the second half. First, Ancelotti, as if folding the banners, removed the Croat and the German from the field. And then Guardiola, showing at the same time both superiority and chivalrous readiness not to finish off the opponent this very second, removed Gundogan and De Bruyne from the game.
But Guardiola could have put on the field the same, only fresher players, ready to fight and create. That’s how Foden entered the field. His first actions were bulldog throws at opponents, and the main act was a graceful pass to Alvarez. Real Madrid, against this background, was old-fashioned. He has outstanding players in their positions according to the principle of division of labor: here is a brilliant winger, there is a penalty area knight, and here is the headquarters of all operations, capable of hitting beautifully from a distance once or twice per game. Such a kick from a free-kick to the crossbar from Kroos was the last chance for the royal secret police of Real to keep up with the tactical revolutionaries from Manchester.
Carlo Ancelotti with this lost semi-final entered the history of the Champions League: no coach has yet played 191 matches in the tournament. Active longevity and coaching thought, and outstanding players – one of the most important ideas of Carlo since the days when he played and coached Milan. And its research center is famous throughout the football world for precisely the methods of preserving football players up to the 40th anniversary. But everything has limits. Guardiola persistently pushed a whole galaxy of excellent Real Madrid veterans towards conditional Saudi Arabia, for a well-deserved rest.
Istanbul final of England and Milan 18 years later
City will be favorites for the Istanbul final, where another group of weathered and resilient adults awaits them. Dzeko, who once played for City, and Mkhitaryan, who once won a European Cup with City’s main rivals in England, are the most prominent players in the semi-final clash with AC Milan.
The English team against the Milan team in the Istanbul final is already a whole cultural layer. The great final of 2005 between Milan and Liverpool is a symbol of the triumph of the first half and the tragedy of the Ancelotti team with the final whistle. For Carlo, there is no longer any repetition or revenge. And we must hope for the exciting plot of the last match, because apart from him nothing else stands in the way of Josep Guardiola to the long-deserved Champions Cup.
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Source: Sportbox
Thomas Astudillo is a sports journalist and author who writes for Sportish. He has a deep love and knowledge of sports, and is known for his engaging and informative writing on the latest sports news and events.