One way or another, this was always going to end up being a Pep day. At the final whistle Pep Guardiola didn’t punch the air or really celebrate at all. Instead he walked quite slowly over to the scorer of the only goal, Antoine Semenyo, and vigorously triple-patted his buttocks, then meandered around the edges of the bobbing huddles on the Wembley pitch.
There will be a temptation to look for clues here. Nobody really knows if Guardiola is leaving Manchester City at the end of the season. Contract extension brinkmanship is nothing new, although not with quite so much whispered chat about assistants on the move and leaked replacement plans.
