Hi bro, nice post.
One thing I try to do is make sure I listen to these guys in addition to watching what they do.
Now firstly, people usually forget that you don't score against that Pep Barca easily at all. People think it's just because they possess the ball, they forget how 3 players will immediately swoop on you to recover the ball, once that Barca team looses the ball. That's defence from all over the pitch(especially from the front), but their attractive passing-game lured a lot of people into overlooking the fact that Pep was actually very good defensively at Barca and Bayern.
Now on listening to Pep himself. I personally listened to Pep explain his English experience. He discovered:
The physicality was a shock and something he had never experienced before.
The game play in England kept frustrating his style. He said the number of times the ball is hoofed into the air was alarming to him and there was a danger of teams scoring you with those long balls.
So that's it, both points pointed to the need for physicality. He didn't need that kind of physicality before England, so when he came to England in the beginning he had no qualms benching the exquisite physical specimen of a player– Yaya Toure.
But England taught him a lesson and he had to go for physicality, not that his system had a fault per se. BTW these were the things fans kept telling Wenger at a time, they will say this team is beautiful, but too soft, buy physical players.
Well Pep didn't waste time to adapt and he therefore changed and intentionally began recruitmenting more physical players especially around the defensive areas(midfield or defence). That's the City you now have.
Thank you bro
Guardiola is a coach who prefers defense, but through possession. As long as the ball is at the feet of his players, the team cannot receive opportunities. Everything happens with the ball, as the coach described it in an old dialogue at the beginning of his career with Barcelona.
This appeared in what the coach presented with Barcelona, when Victor Valdez succeeded in winning the Zamora Award as the least goal-receiving goalkeeper in La Liga in 4 consecutive years.
And when he left to coach Bayern Munich, it was also the team that conceded the least goals in 3 consecutive seasons, meaning that Guardiola's team in 7 different seasons showed significant defensive strength, but only in an unusual way.
My pleasure, an insightful blog like yours, will tend to attract analysers.🙂
Well, on this your latest note, it happens that I have replied it above already. Like I said people often forget the FEROCIOUS PRESSING OF BARCA WHEN THEY LOOSE POSSESSION, this is also key to Pep's style– City does this press too.
Yup eventhough he described his possession style in the old dialogue you talked about, there has been so many other dialogues and publications after then, that we have monitored.
So the truth is, his defensive masterstroke is not only about possession, it also includes quickly recovering the ball when you loose it. He once gave his players an exact number of seconds by which time he expects them to retrieve the ball, if they loose it.
My regards man.
Cheers