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The story of their legendary encounter has resurfaced, as it happens every time their paths cross in football.
The story of Marcelo Bielsa – mentor, teacher, manager – and Pep Guardiola, a recently retired player, making his way to retirement from his ranch in Rosario, Argentina, and receiving wisdom tablets as they roast beef legs together over an open fire, in 2006.
The almost comical intensity of his supposed 11-hour talk that day, with Bielsa’s computer used to verify facts and settle arguments, and Guardiola’s film director friend, David Trueba, positioned between two chairs to represent a tactical move in a stage. assumes the tactic dominated the conversation.
Marcelo Bielsa enjoys an almost mentor relationship with Manchester City manager Pep Guadiola
But Guardiola’s favorite Bielsa axiom is about how to deal with winning and losing. It is said to be the first thing he wrote, in black marker, on the blackboard sandwiched between a cartoon of Noel Gallagher and a framed verse of the song by the musician Rock ‘n’ Roll Star in his manager’s office on Etihad Campus.
And it looks incredibly relevant to his teams Leeds United and Manchester City meeting in Yorkshire on Saturday.
“The moments in my life in which I have improved are closely related to failure,” says Bielsa’s maxim. “The moments in my life when I have regressed are closely related to success. Being successful deforms us as human beings. It relaxes us. He plays a trick on us. It makes us worse individuals. Feed our egos. Failure forms us, makes us more solid, brings us closer to our convictions. It makes us more coherent. ‘
It’s a lot of words and one wonders if Guardiola really scribbled everything, as suggested by his friend and writer Lu Martin in his book on City, The Making of a Superteam.
But Bielsa knows the man 16 years his junior will have viewed last weekend’s 5-2 home loss to Leicester through that kind of prism and spent the past six days searching for answers.
“Above all he is imaginative,” Bielsa said of Guardiola, through his translator in Leeds, this week. “He is able to instantly create solutions to the problems he encounters. And what he proposes, he is capable of implementing. We imagine football narrowly. Guardiola imagines football freely.
‘I don’t feel like his mentor. It’s not like that. Here is a manager who is independent in his ideas. The ideas are his and not just because I say there is a way to play ”.
The couple have not spoken this week. They’re a generation away, Guardiola is currently doing with tapered cargo pants what Bielsa isn’t doing with baggy sweatpants, but they share the same philosophy about pressing the ball high up the field.
Pep Guardiola will be desperate to bounce back from his team’s 5-2 loss to Leicester
In one of the few detailed discussions of Rosario’s asado, in the 2016 book Pep: The Evolution, Guardiola says the meeting was key for him to develop the idea of the press in the first place.
“I started to play with this idea after a talk with Marcelo,” Guardiola tells author Marti Perarnau, who was granted exceptional access to this and a second book. We meet to talk about soccer. It is important to spend time with people who speak with a lot of common sense.
‘Obviously, if one or two of your players can’t handle it, forget (about the system). But if everyone is willing and able, then I would love to force the other team to go back to their area and not give them a nose for the ball for the full 90 minutes. ‘
Sunday’s catastrophe against Brendan Rodgers’ team revealed that not all Guardiola players were ‘capable’. The side lacked musculature and fundamental alertness. Rodri, by not closing in in the central areas, once again looked at a shadow of the player who has been Fernandinho when it comes to shielding the defense against the full-backs who seek to counter-attack.
Guardiola hopes that the arrival of Ruben Dias for 64 million pounds will add aggression to his bottom line
“Imagining playing like this doesn’t mean that footballers are going to act in the same way,” Bielsa said about the pressure system.
This was not a criticism of City. “I am never very comfortable talking about an opponent’s weaknesses,” he said. “The season is very short and it is very difficult to draw conclusions about whether they are weaker than before.”
But while his own players may lack Guardiola’s individual technical excellence, in their current form they seem far more incisive. Eight years have passed since Bielsa’s last meeting with Guardiola: his Athletic Bilbao team lost the Copa del Rey final 3-0 in Madrid, which marked a winning end to the Catalan era at Barcelona. But Bielsa appears to be the more effective of the two when it comes to shaping the raw material at his disposal.
Jack Harrison, on loan to Leeds from City and absent on Saturday under the terms of that deal, has improved tremendously under his training. Also Kalvin Phillips and Mateusz Klich, both players are reborn, although they receive their verbal instructions through a translator.
Sources suggest that Bielsa also told Guardiola in Rosario that spotting good players was one thing, but improving them within the system was a much greater skill. Guardiola, who has claimed 24 trophies of Bielsa’s three as a coach, has worked in richer clubs where the need is less, although he can point to Seydou Keita in Barcelona and Raheem Sterling among those he has transformed.
Against Liverpool three weeks ago, Bielsa had five players operating at the top of the field to elude the best pressure side in the Premier League and came out with three goals. That tactic could hurt a City central defender that has yet to recover from Vincent Kompany’s departure and is reinforced on Saturday by Ruben Dias.
The 23-year-old, whose £ 65 million arrival from Benfica has raised Guardiola’s spending on defenders to more than £ 400 million, carries the weight of the City system on his shoulders. The club has struggled to develop the elite center halves necessary to prevent their ambitious top line from leaving them wide open at the rear.
Marcelo Bielsa has guided Leeds to two wins in their first three Premier League games
But Leeds also looks vulnerable on defense, with Robin Koch yet to settle. Bielsa says he is not encouraged by the fact that City would operate a fake number 9 on Saturday, eliminating the same central attack threat posed by Liverpool and Fulham.
There are symmetrical philosophies and weaknesses, then, although all the pressure is on the man who came to seek answers that day in the plains of northeastern Argentina and now needs more.
“I don’t see it that much,” Guardiola said of Bielsa on Friday. I don’t see it every week. But when I have the pleasure of spending time with him, he always inspires me. I think he is probably the person I most admire in world football, as a coach and as a person.
No one can imitate it. The value of the coach does not depend on how many titles you have won. My teams may have won more, but in terms of knowledge of the game and many things, I am still far from it. ‘
