After a rough week for Pep Guardiola, if it is any consolation, he is far from alone in the Premier League in letting standards slipThe image of Pep Guardiola with his head in his hands contemplating Manchester City’s Champions League exit from a seat in the Colin Bell stand is likely to be an enduring one. This, the unwritten caption will say, is what England can do to the world’s finest coaching talent.To be strictly accurate it was not English football’s fault that Guardiola lost it so completely at the end of the first half against Liverpool, it was more a combination of Martin Atkinson and the Spanish referee Antonio Mateu Lahoz. Related: The bald fact for Pep Guardiola is...
After three straight defeats, City’s manager is not ‘a fraud’ and neither has he been ‘found out’ – rather rivals have realised how to exploit his side’s weak spotsIs Pep Guardiola a bald fraud? Before Manchester City’s three consecutive defeats in the last eight days, this seemed to be one of the more urgent questions of the modern sporting age.It looked a simple enough dichotomy. Is the man who gave us the most compelling elite club team and the finished‑article Lionel Messi, a high‑class manager whose teams retain a skein of brittleness against the best opponents? Or is he, in fact, a fraud. And not just a fraud but a bald fraud. A bald foreign fraud, the worst kind of...
If Liverpool were considering parking the bus in the Champions League second leg on Tuesday, they should reconsiderForget the league title for a moment. This was an object lesson in why Manchester City are going to struggle to keep Liverpool’s players off the scoresheet when the Champions League quarter‑final resumes on Tuesday.At the moment City require four goals to go through – should Liverpool score they will need at least five – and allowing a feeble Manchester United back into this game from a position where they should have been dead and buried will have done nothing for their confidence. Related: Pogba inspires dramatic comeback win as Manchester United spoil City’s party Related: José Mourinho the ultimate party pooper rains on Guardiola’s parade | Jonathan...
Manchester United manager pulls off a great escape to leave the champions elect, Manchester City, blushing after 3-2 home defeatThe ice melts sadly around the unopened champagne. The fireworks remain unfired, the streamers tightly furled. José Mourinho, perhaps the greatest wet blanket in football history, had done it again.Manchester City’s celebrations will come but they are deferred, and that was Mourinho’s primary objective. But he has offered further evidence of this City side’s curious vulnerability, inflicted a trauma that might yet resurface to significant effect in the future and, more even than that, shown that, however much Pep Guardiola wants to make football a game of three-dimensional chess, he can drag him into a bar fight, play the game on...
Offering Paul Pogba to his club’s rivals is a classic, aggressive Mino Raiola trick. But does this join up some of the dots when it comes to the deterioration in the player’s form?The first time Zlatan Ibrahimovic met Mino Raiola, the agent who has looked after his business for the last 15 years, was when a journalist friend, Thijs Sleiger from Voetbal International, had set them up with a meeting at the Okura hotel in Amsterdam. Ibrahimovic’s former agent, Anders Carlsson, had blown the previous arrangement by offering his client, then a player at Ajax, a move to Southampton (to which the young Zlatan apparently replied: “What the fuck! Southampton! Is that my level?”) The next guy, Ibrahimovic had been...