Moving Mohamed Salah to the centre proved to revive Liverpool in a thrilling spectacle made all the more wild by the manager’s late sending offTowards the end of this thrilling, slightly wild afternoon at Anfield, Jürgen Klopp could be seen with his arms outspread, a tableau of pathos, disbelief, astonishment, bewildered to find himself handed a red card by Anthony Taylor and sent from his touchline.As Klopp whirled away, almost sprinting from pitchside, air‑guitaring wildly, still barking and yelping and pointing, it was hard to disagree with his look of stunned surprise. This made no sense at all. How exactly had Klopp managed to last 85 minutes out there? Continue reading...
They faced very different tasks on arriving in Manchester but both were quick to make tough calls to improve their teamsTwo bald men with gimlet stares. Two coaches united by a Cruyffian vision of football and trying to impose it in a foreign land. But as Sunday’s Manchester derby approaches, it doesn’t feel as though Pep Guardiola and Erik ten Hag have that much in common.Ten Hag’s star is rising. After his successes at Ajax, only now are his ideas reaching a truly global public and being tested at the highest level. Guardiola is the old master, with 10 championships in the big five leagues to his name. His philosophy is not merely well-known but has shaped the modern game...
Debuting superstar striker is upstaged by a teammate and an opponent during defeat to Liverpool in the Community ShieldOK. This might take a while. Just talk among yourselves. For Erling Haaland this was a debut not just to forget, but to shred, incinerate and bury at the bottom of the garden. Haaland looked limb-weary by the end of this clammy high-summer Community Shield final, a curtain-raiser for a stage that has scarcely been cleared of tables and men in brown coats.For much of the second half at the King Power Stadium Haaland skulked and mooched in the centre circle. With seconds left he produced a wonderfully wholehearted miss, clumping his shot off the top of the bar with all the...
Barça have opted to buy big instead of backing a young squad and a manager steeped in the club’s values and traditionsThe greatest trick Pep Guardiola ever pulled was to convince the world that club DNA exists. Football changed when Guardiola was appointed Barcelona manager in 2008. It’s not just that the world’s eyes were opened to the full potential of possession football or that goals a game shot up in the knockout stages of the Champions League – although both did happen – but that a model was presented of how things could be.Here was a coach with no first-team experience who immediately offloaded two big-name foreign stars in Ronaldinho and Deco and, in his first season, won the...
The manager has become central to Manchester City’s approach of setting about elite sport like a political projectIt seemed fitting that Manchester City should come storming back from the brink the way they did, Ilkay Gündogan soaring like a small, technically adept avenging phoenix to bullet his header very carefully into the top corner of the Aston Villa net. This is how they do this stuff around here. Not with more heat, more blood, more chaos; but with cleaner lines, greater clarity, a red mist of extreme precision.Within six minutes of that opening act Pep Guardiola’s champions had completed the most beautifully orderly emergency comeback in English footballing history. And there is something genuinely fearless about being able to play...