Waking from a dream, exhausted by his studies, struggling, for now, to channel the force, Pep Guardiola looks up through the misty combat cave and sees his arch adversary Mikel Arteta striding towards him, lightsaber already unsheathed and cleaving the air.
Pep leaps up in fear, attacks and strikes down his nemesis. Stepping forward tenderly, he stoops to see the human face of his fallen foe. But peering through the hole in that shiny black plastic Lego hairpiece he sees instead: the face of Pep Guardiola.
Well, that’s one way it could have gone down. For so long this season the challenge of Guardiola’s four-times champions has seemed to centre around hauling in his former pupil at the top of the table, while simultaneously becoming something else, absorbing the new tactical rhythms of Erling Haaland.
A cultural reboot, a seven-year itch, the struggle of the team that love to pass to incorporate a brilliant player whose one great weakness is, basically, not being very good at passing. A trip to face Arteta’s youthful team seemed like the perfect dramatisation of that battle, a chance to strike down in the flesh that younger version of himself. This was going to be the story of Wednesday’s top-of-the-table meeting at the Emirates.
Except we have this. The Empire has struck back, in the form of the Premier League’s case against City’s owners. And Guardiola has some less abstract adversaries to fight. There is also a way of seeing this as a footballing, tactical challenge, as well as an existential issue, a conspiracy issue, a chance to defy the cartel and all the rest of it. Perhaps these two strands are about to coalesce.
Sunday’s home win against Aston Villa felt different in more ways than one. The most obvious was the injection of a defiant, defensive energy from the touchline and the stands, undeniably a very useful tool in sport. But the shift was tactical as well as textural. At times there has been a sense of a team falling into introspection, the danger of an extended version of overthinking, an unnecessarily complex version of how to make this fine-woven team win with Occam’s razor playing up front. Here is the tactical equivalent of a Glock 45 pistol. See if you can knit a jumper with it.
Perhaps what Guardiola really needed was a more concentrated sense of jeopardy, something to distract him from his distractions. And you do have to hand it to Pep. He knows how to whistle up a winning culture, from finessing an entire generational style of possession football to working the margins on more than 100 charges of financial irregularity.
The press conference before the Villa game was brilliantly clear in its messaging. No compromise. No doubts. Me and you against the world. The chance was there to say, these are just charges, let’s just see what happens. Instead, Guardiola chose to go deep into conspiracy and victimhood, to summon a Trump-like appeal to the worst instincts of the tribe, to rubbish the idea there might be something worth understanding here. A manager whose entire career is a tribute to trusting the process has a new message: don’t trust the process. Don’t trust the system. Let’s face it, if your job is simply to win, it’s a great tactic.
The truth is Pep hasn’t seemed quite so energised all season. There has been talk of angst and entropy, body language stuff, sated ambition. How do you summon anger and will from a standing start?
External adversity is one way. The threat is no longer vague or internalised. It is instead clear, present and unifying. From here any kind of victory will seem like a vindication. There really is no better time to stuff the process and go full Haaland.
There was a telling moment in the defeat at Tottenham as Haaland turned in a deep position and played a pass out to Jack Grealish – the right pass, but presumably with insufficient speed and fizz, losing a tiny sliver of time and space. Guardiola threw his arms up and wheeled around, stopping just short of a full version of The Slump. He was right too. It came to nothing. But throughout that afternoon there was a temptation to wonder why Haaland was straying into those spaces, trying to play like a Pep striker, rehearsing the weakest not the strongest parts of his game.
Against Villa, even the structure of City’s attack looked different. Guardiola picked his best players, but there was also clarity and urgency in their forward movements, the tempo of City’s passing seemed geared towards their obvious attacking ace.
Haaland touched the ball 26 times against Spurs, but still seemed largely uninvolved. Against Villa he had six touches in 45 minutes, but affected the game constantly. His runs were full of menace. He drove Villa’s defence back towards its own goal. He made great runs and received early passes (the interactions with Kevin De Bruyne have always been good). He provided a wonderful assist with one of his five passes. Doing all these things, basically just running towards the goal, Haaland is a defender’s nightmare rather than someone learning to speak Esperanto without his glasses on.
Who knows, perhaps this sudden force majeure, the addition of a little external jeopardy, is the nudge Guardiola needed to see Haaland as a loaded gun, not a question to be solved. Before the Spurs game, he was still talking respectfully about Haaland learning from Harry Kane. And it is natural there will be some stutters while City incorporate this phenomenon, a 22-year-old who can score 25 league goals by February, but at times seem also to muddle your methods. Is there a more thrillingly unbalanced footballer anywhere in the world? Haaland has more goals in the top five leagues by a distance. He has also made five successful dribbles, two tackles and one long pass all season.
With time, Pep was always likely to find a way to adapt, to create a bespoke version. But the best moments for Haaland at City have been the simplest: the chaos caused by his speed and presence when he plays right at the edge of the attack, the need to simply pass the ball repeatedly into the right space.
City had perhaps moved away from that in recent weeks. Wednesday night, with winning an end in itself, against opponents who also keep the ball and press high, might just be another case for taking the shortest route to victory.
