Sensational City: How Pep Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Long Ball

To watch Pep Guardiola during one of his team’s matches is to watch a man suffer. It’s viewing a one-man performance on the agony of anxiety. There are gesticulating arms, blood-curdling wails to the heavens, and frustrated tugs at the strings of a hooded sweatshirt. One could be forgiven for thinking that Guardiola manages a club in perennial threat of relegation and not one on the verge of its fifth league title in six seasons.

Not to play armchair psychologist, but Guardiola’s penchant for twitchy nervousness might explain why he’s always seemed obsessed with control – specifically, having his teams control matches through a suffocating amount of possession.

At Barcelona, midfield maestros Sergio Busquets, Xavi, and Andres Iniesta would pass acute, right, and obtuse triangles around their opponents. It was the world’s most dazzling game of keep away. When the ball was lost, a frenzied press was initiated to try and win it back as quickly as possible. It was as though Guardiola’s players could sense their manager’s panic at having to watch the other team have possession.

Inheriting a Bayern Munich team that had just won a treble by playing swiftly and directly under Jupp Heynckes, Guardiola ensured his barnstorming Bavarians were educated in the art of Catalan control. Retaining possession and maintaining a structured defensive shape when possession was relinquished were the primary objectives for Guardiola at Bayern. He got creative to achieve those goals.

One of the best fullbacks of his generation, Philipp Lahm, was plopped into midfield because Guardiola had sleep paralysis nightmares of Bundesliga counterattacks. Lahm offered defensive nous and a James Joyce-level reading of the game in the center of the pitch.

Much finely-tuned, well-orchestrated success has occurred for Guardiola at Manchester City. His magnum opus in exerting jurisdiction over the proceedings of football matches may have occurred last season. An overwhelming amount of the preseason chatter concerning Manchester City ahead of the 2021-22 season centered on the team lacking a proven, prolific number nine.

But who needs a proven number nine when you can have multiple false nines? An army of diminutive attacking midfielders like Kevin De Bruyne, Phil Foden, and Bernardo Silva all popped up in the places you would expect a striker to occupy throughout the season and Guardiola’s City scored 99 goals en route to the Premier League title.

Guardiola’s fixation with control via possession has led many to conclude he’s an idealist. The pretty passing patterns, the demands for positional flexibility from his players, and his penchant for deploying tiny playmakers where lumbering strikers should be positioned have all been deemed to be aesthetic choices. And then a giant Norwegian showed up.

“The people say ‘how are you going to play?” Guardiola said in his post-match interview after City’s 4-1 dismantling of Arsenal. “Tell me how the opponent is going to defend or attack me.”

So really, the guy’s been a pragmatist all along. It just took the arrival of Erling Haaland for Guardiola’s pragmatism to become less about retaining the ball and more about driving it straight down the opposition’s throat.

Against Arsenal, the man notorious for overthinking set his team up in a 4-2-3-1 shape that was brazen in its simplicity. There was no fullback masquerading as a midfielder as John Stones has done for much of the season (and really, he’s been a center-back masquerading as a fullback masquerading as a midfielder). And there was certainly nothing false about City’s nine.

Stones and Ruben Dias were City’s center-back pairing, while Kyle Walker and Manuel Akanji were conservative fullbacks. Rodri and Ilkay Gundogan were the double pivot in front of the back four – notable because they were playing as a double pivot for a man who has previously espoused a disdain for the concept of a double pivot.

Bernardo Silva and Jack Grealish played on the wings for City, but the wide areas of the pitch were virtually irrelevant to Guardiola’s game plan. The Spaniard wanted to drive his extravagantly-funded City team directly down Route One.

Guardiola knew Arsenal were going to press high. A high press has been integral to Arsenal’s great if one-dimensional approach all season. Because a high press was how Arsenal chose to defend, going long to Haaland and De Bruyne was how City elected to attack. It’s often easier to play over a high press than to play through one, especially when you have a fire-breathing monster as your center forward.

City’s first goal of the match in the seventh minute perfectly illustrated how Guardiola wanted to attack Arsenal. Haaland dropped near the halfway line to receive a long pass from Stones. He was behind Arsenal midfielder Thomas Partey and was holding off center-back Rob Holding. Throughout the evening, Haaland and De Bruyne (playing almost as a second striker) were excellent at exploiting the space behind the Gunners’ midfield duo of Partey and Granit Xhaka but in front of center-backs Holding and Gabriel.

Haaland then turned to play the ball to De Bruyne, who surged straight at Arsenal’s goal and fired a missile of a shot past a helpless Aaron Ramsdale. De Bruyne would add a second goal after halftime, and Haaland finally put his name on the scoresheet just before the match’s conclusion, rounding off one of his best all-around performances in a City shirt. The duo was sensational, and every time one of the pair touched the ball, a City goal seemed imminent.

City concluded the match with 52% of the possession – the majority, yes, but less than what one would typically associate with a Guardiola team. The addition of Haaland has changed what Guardiola considers the most effective way for his team to play. And this version of City is very effective. Maybe it’s finally time for Guardiola to relax.

Eric McCoy

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