Pep Guardiola's adventures in Manchester City

Hapless_Hans wrote:
Pep's problem is that his players are flopping, Bravo flopped hard, Stones flopped even harder, Gündogan turned out to be not available.
But most of all, his tactical plan for City is not stable.

ES wrote:

Hapless_Hans wrote:
Pep's problem is that his players are flopping, Bravo flopped hard, Stones flopped even harder, Gündogan turned out to be not available.
But most of all, his tactical plan for City is not stable.

Hans hit the nail on the head here

Instead of trying to fit square pegs into round holes, how about you adapt yourself to the player's abilities? Its clear these guys can't play the way Pep wants them to play, so why the stubborness? It doesn't always have to be the way he wants it to be, sometimes he needs to change, evolve, play differently.

ES wrote:-----------------Lloris
Semedo---Bonucci---Laporte---Grimaldo
-----------------Fabinho
----Sane---Verratti---KDB---Sanchez
------------------Jesus

ES wrote:Misspelt Papu Gomez, Izzo and Mandragora there

rincon wrote:Isn't Fabinho a fullback?

farfan wrote:

rincon wrote:Isn't Fabinho a fullback?

Yep, but Jardim converted him to a midfielder this season.

rincon wrote:He'll get there for sure. He'll drop 300m more this summer

Great Leader Sprucenuce wrote:

donttreadonred wrote:

I suppose my real question is this: did Pep know just how large of a rebuilding project he was signing up for? Through his relatively short managerial career, he's never been a long-term builder. He's just not stayed in one place long enough (4 years Barca, 3 years Bayern). Moreover, both of his previous clubs had talent when he arrived. He simply needed to bring out the best in his current players (which I think is his forte). I'm very curious to see how he goes about recruiting the players that will turn city around, because I'm not convinced they're currently on the books.

If he didn't he sure as hell does now lol, honestly while he'll have the money to make it happen it will be interesting to see how he does in building a squad.

He kind of did at Bayern and Barca in a way but those teams also had significant building blocks already in place.

This time he's going to have to build around players who have no experience in winning outside of Gundogan winning the Bundesliga so this might take longer than people realise.

ES wrote:I'm not sure what Mole was on about with realistic discussions when DTOR said 'The City squad just wasn't built for Pep.'. So yeah, blame shifting.

BarrileteCosmico wrote:
I did expect City to be better at this stage, but then again their only competent midfielder is Silva and having a good midfield is a requirement for a Pep team.

Casciavit wrote:The offensive half of City's team looks good. City doesn't really have problems creating chances, they have problems finishing them off and preventing the opposition from creating chances.

The process was always going to take longer since he's teaching his football to declining footballers, unlike Barca and Bayern were the players had an idea of what he was bringing. Barca because of La Masia, and Bayern because of LVG.

He should have bought new fullbacks over the summer, and he has himself to blame for that. Yes, you can't replace the entire team in one summer, but that was clearly an area of reinforcement. Either way, there's going to be a big overhaul this summer. City will look very different next summer, and I can't wait TBH.

Jonathan Wilson wrote: Pep Guardiola’s zonal theory will take time for Manchester City to learn

The Barcelona and Bayern Munich players were already familiar with Guardiola’s complex juego de posición theory – at City he was virtually starting from scratch

The fashion these days is to knife a manager at the first sign of trouble. Nobody is allowed to build, nobody is allowed to learn from a mistake. Move to a new country, take over a new team, try to adapt to a new environment and if you’re not winning titles six months later you’re a fraud. Neither Jürgen Klopp nor Pep Guardiola are under pressure as such heading into Sunday’s game at the Etihad, but both are facing grumblings of discontent.
[..]
Guardiola’s project, his basic theory of play, is more complex. His preferred term for his philosophy is juego de posición and to instil it he divides the training pitch into 20 sections.
[..]
The idea is that players adjust their position according to which zone the ball is in. But that is just the foundation: ideally players should be flexible enough to fill a zone that would, in the initial template, be filled by somebody else, creating a level of rotation to overman in key areas while maintaining a structure that should both offer passing options and maintain a defensive shape that can react effectively to the loss of possession and a counterattack by being immediately prepared to counter-press.
[..]
Instilling those positional ideas is difficult. While basic elements such as a holding midfielder dropping between the two centre-backs to overman when playing out from the back against two centre-forwards, or even the full-back coming inside when the winger goes wide and vice versa, can be readily grasped, the principle of responding constantly to a mental pitch map is rather harder.

At Barcelona, Guardiola was dealing with players who had been prepared for his extreme interpretation of the theory from their upbringing at La Masia; at Bayern Munich, he was working with players who had been instructed in a (more cautious) variant of the philosophy by Louis van Gaal.

At City, he was virtually starting from scratch, which is perhaps why implementation there has proved so much trickier. It seems likely there will be a clearout in the summer and that more signings will be made but perhaps most important is that players who are already at the club assimilate the 20-zone system.

Unique wrote:So does that mean one day klopp will put a team
Out that can defend.