“I don’t like that, no,” said Pep Guardiola with a slightly edgy laugh. The Manchester City manager was trying to process, decompress and, yes, enjoy the Champions League semi‑final, second-leg dismantling of Real Madrid on Wednesday night when it was put to him that Jack Grealish had just said the team felt unstoppable.
In fairness to Grealish, he had called it after the first leg in Madrid, using the same word to describe the mood in the City dressing room before the Etihad return. To Guardiola, it was probably the only time the winger put so much as a syllable out of place.
Grealish was outstanding, albeit he was hardly alone in that regard as City stormed to a 4-0 win for a 5-1 aggregate success to set up a final against Internazionale in Istanbul on 10 June. There was a moment in the second half when Guardiola blew kisses at Grealish, which was certainly a counterpoint to the blow-up with Kevin De Bruyne. Guardiola and the midfielder exchanged angry words and gestures after De Bruyne made a bad decision on the ball. The emotions were raw.
Back to Grealish. Guardiola wanted to say it was great his players felt unstoppable and it is plainly a statement of fact – 23 games without defeat, one win away from another Premier League title, into the finals of the FA Cup and now the Champions League. The ultimate treble, the Manchester United treble, is within their grasp.
But, you know, maybe don’t say it out loud. “Because every team is stoppable if you do what you have to do … in football, things change completely from one day to the next,” Guardiola said. And, because, if there was one area of sensitivity for him after such a colossal victory and epic run, it is the notion City merely have to turn up in Istanbul to scratch their Champions League itch.
Inter are a good team, defensively secure in their 3-5-2 system. They have kept clean sheets in five of their six knockout ties, the exception being the 3-3 home draw in the quarter-final second leg against Benfica. They had been 3-1 up on the night and 5-1 to the good on aggregate when they conceded two after the 86th minute.
The suspicion remains that Inter have enjoyed a nice draw; they had Porto in the last 16 and, after Benfica, Milan in the semi-final. They lost at home and away to Bayern Munich in the group phase although, decisively for their qualification, they did take four points from Barcelona. They sit third in Serie A.
Guardiola would laugh off the idea that complacency stands to be an enemy for City and when have they been anything less than laser-like in their focus? Also, they will have the heartbreak of the 2021 final defeat against Chelsea in their minds, just as they did last season’s semi-final loss to Madrid before this rematch. But it will be an element of the external narrative and it was interesting to see how Guardiola addressed it.
“If there is one incredible detail of this team that I am so proud of, it’s they are so humble,” he said. “Every game, it doesn’t matter the opponent or the competition … they take it seriously.
“I hate the arrogance in sports. I hate the moments when you believe you are something that you are not. The people are going to talk now – they [Inter] are not favourite, we are favourite and so on … that is the worst that can happen.
“You can listen you are the favourite, you believe that you are, you believe you are something special … you are not. We are favourites from the beginning of the season – favourites, favourites … So it’s not easy to handle. They’ve had that feeling [of pressure all along]. It’s normal.”
Guardiola can take heart from how his backup players have performed when called upon, how they are training, which is a barometer every manager looks for – take Aymeric Laporte, Riyad Mahrez, Phil Foden and Julián Álvarez for example. The last three of those came on towards the end against Madrid, Mahrez and Foden combining to set up Álvarez for the final goal.
But what really fortifies Guardiola is the form of his starters and on Wednesday it was impossible to give any of them a rating of less than 8/10. Maybe the goalkeeper, Ederson, because he had so little to do? There was precious little jeopardy – a theme of the past few months, which can leave the neutral feeling a little cold.
It would be wrong to reverse-engineer the result as being down to Madrid’s shortcomings. They had looked like a champion team in the first leg and the reason they came to resemble a lower-league minnow on a Cup visit to the Etihad, clinging on in the face of the onslaught – mainly in the first half – was because City simply swamped them. Their intensity and high-speed patterns of play were too much.
Guardiola had picked up on a comment from Toni Kroos, the Madrid midfielder stating his team could have lost 10-1 or 10-2 in last season’s first leg at the Etihad only for it to finish 4-3 against them, paving the way for the comeback. Guardiola felt his team had played the same game in that first leg as they did on Wednesday; it was just they did not get what they deserved.
As City passed up chances in the first 20 minutes, it would have been easy for them to fret. Ditto when Madrid began to make a few inroads in the second half at 2-0 down; a goal might have changed the dynamics, awakened the demons. But City did not relent. It was a triumph of mentality, too.
Guardiola wanted his team to be quicker and more incisive in the attacking transitions than in the first leg, and got just that. He explained that his more patient approach at the Bernabéu was down in part to the state of the turf. “I heard that the grass was really, really bad, really poor, and I needed to put one more player in our buildup for more control of the game,” he said.
Guardiola would only say that revenge for last season had been a factor after the second leg, having previously denied it. He also refused to engage on the matter of whether a victory over Madrid was even sweeter for a Barcelona man like him. Everybody knows the truth. Just as they know that Guardiola, as with Grealish, surely feels unstoppable.
