Guardiola's Halcyon Days

Sean O'Conor

"During those four years all the stars aligned at the perfect moments" - Pep Guardiola.

It was a golden age.

Guardiola's four years in charge of FC Barcelona bucked trends and exploded received wisdom like no other playing style had since Dutch Total Football in the 1970s. He had done it all by the age of 40.

How good were Pep's Barça in the greater scheme of things? Certainly one of the great dynasties alongside 1950s Real Madrid, 1970s Ajax, 1980s Liverpool and 1990s Milan, but probably better than all of them.

A decade ago the planet was toasting F.C. Barcelona as the greatest team of all time, Guardiola as the world's greatest manager and perennial underachievers Spain as the European and world champions.

Time will tell the whole truth, but those facts alone make the age of tiki-taka a genuine revolution.

"Barcelona won the World Cup!" a Catalan friend told me after the 2010 final. Six of Spain's eleven starters were Barça players, seven counting the recently acquired David Villa.

Spain had taken the Guardiola method onto the international stage and found it just as fruitful. The irony was that for the ultimate prize they beat the Netherlands, the nation whence it sprang. The pupil had defeated the master.

Their new game was a miracle. Attacking with little men through the middle, playing always to feet even in the tightest spaces, forcing defenders and goalkeepers to pass instead of clearing the ball from the back - whoever had foreseen that?

Johann Cruyff had, when he sowed the seed after taking over as Barcelona manager in 1988, finally bagging the European Cup for the club in 1992 and bringing a young Catalan defender through the ranks who would go on to scale even greater heights.

Under Guardiola, Barça took his mentor's ideas to near perfection, not least thanks to a magnificent midfield trio of Lionel Messi, Andres Iniesta and Xavi, three pocket dynamos with low centres of gravity, quick feet and perfect passing. At its peak around 2010, tiki-taka was simply breathtaking.

The blaugrana shirts did not go 'droit au but' (straight to goal) via route one but gradually advanced into enemy territory through mesmerizing 'rondos' - mobile passing triangles.

Little ants in blue and burgundy shirts scurried to and fro while closely guarding possession according to a pre-programmed matrix which dazzled sides raised on conventional tactics and analogue formations.

Once the ball reached the opponents' last third of the field, the team would make more dummy runs to bamboozle the defence, the quantity of attackers eventually inundating the retreating side. If they lost the ball they would have six seconds to regain it via frenzied, mass pressing before reclaiming their shape.

In effect it was a team of midfielders and the goalkeeper was required to distribute as skilfully as any of the outfield ten, a link to Jan Jongbloed of Holland's 1970s World Cup sides.

The Masia magic reached its peak in May 2011 with a 3-1 win over Manchester United in the Champions League final in London, where Barça were a class apart, outshooting their normally formidable opponents on target by a tally of 12-1.

Three of the protagonists that night - Sergio Busquets, Lionel Messi and Gerard Pique, are still wearing the blaugrana in 2020 and Barcelona remain one of the best teams in the world, but tiki-taka has evolved like all life forms must.

Barcelona and Spain lost their crowns in the years following Guardiola's departure and tiki-taka is largely no more.

Since leaving Catalonia, his tactics have added drawing full backs into the centre of midfield, letting midfielders roam and getting his goalkeeper to launch long passes.

Keeping the ball and passing accurately remain Pep staples however, as does the multi-man attack flooding the opposition box like a breaking wave.

He has won titles at Bayern Munich and Manchester City to prove it was not all about the Catalan academy, although the Champions League continues to elude him since that win at Wembley.

Watching the 2018 film "Take the Ball, Pass the Ball", based on Graham Hunter's book Barça, one is reminded this really was a special part of football history.

From the off it was clear Guardiola was the right choice for coach as he was completely obsessed with remoulding established players and imposing his philosophy. Despite the presence of a genuine genius in Messi, the system was the star.

The man himself only appears like an expensive cameo for a few sentences at the end of the film, spoken while the credits are rolling:

"My motivation is tactics," he asserts, "to dissect the game and find solutions."

Putting the system above the individuals inevitably sparked some friction at first but the results spoke for themselves. As tiki-taka became the house recipe, players came up from La Masia well-versed in its intricacies and less likely to rebel than those present at the conversion in 2008.

Goalkeeper Victor Valdes said he first thought Guardiola was "crazy" and "talking Chinese" when he explained how his centre backs would now have to drop back to be in line with the goalkeeper at the start of attacks.

Dmytro Chygrynskiy is shown getting subbed by Guardiola after aiming two long balls towards Zlatan Ibrahimovic instead of playing it out from the back. Players had to conform to the creed.

It is hard to imagine Zlatan's ego thriving there and indeed watching this documentary you would not know he fell out painfully with Guardiola after one season, yelling in his face, calling him a coward and blaming Messi of all people for curtailing his freedom.

A philosophy which trumps personalities and results was of course a Cruyffian legacy and purists might argue it goes all the way back to Hugo Meisl's 'The Whirl' in 1930s Austria or the Schalker Kreisl of the same decade in Germany.

Tiki-taka was patented in Catalonia but kept a deep Dutch imprint. When Xavi says, "Winning is a result of how you play. The philosophy is the most important thing", he could well have been talking about Ajax. Thierry Henry adds similar sentiments about the beauty coming before the result.

What made tiki-taka subtly different from total football however was that the ball's movement mattered more than players switching positions. In that sense it has a distant connection to 'The Combination Game' of late Victorian Britain.

Cruyff was in Hunter's words,"The most important man in the history of professional football" because he wore a triple crown of great player, great coach and great professor. David Winner, author of the brilliant Brilliant Orange, calls Cruyff "the father of the modern game".

Whilst I would concur, to be honest I tire a little of the ubiquitous eulogizing of the Dutch school, only because it places the stadium fan's need for visceral bliss far below the armchair observer's desire for an aesthetic experience.

Despite the fingerprints of Cruyff, Louis Van Gaal and Frank Rijkaard at the Camp Nou, I see Guardiola's Barcelona as less Dutch because it added consistent winning to the already artistic exposition.

Holland are remembered for their numinous 1974 incarnation but while the Germans partied into the Munich night, the Dutch trudged off wearing long faces. Subsequent football literature has in effect rewritten history and awarded that trophy to the losing side, which is a mistake.

In the film, Jordi Cruyff notes his father reflected on Guardiola's opening defeat to Numancia by saying it was the best Barça game he had seen in years. As a fan I would disagree.

This is not to diminish the transformation Cruyff enacted in Catalonia. The Numancia defeat hinted at greater things to come. My jaw dropped when it was revealed that before the Dutchman took charge the club had a requirement where players had to measure at least 1m 80cm.

How many Messis fell by the wayside? I used to have a barber much taller than Messi who told me he had been on Chelsea's books but was let go for height reasons. If you are playing an aerial game, then Peter Crouch helps, but if you want passing football...Tiki-taka was also great because it allowed little boys to get to the top again.

The documentary shows plenty of Messi's greatest hits from sailing through the opposition as a young kid in Argentina to annihilating the world's best defences for Barcelona.

Javier Mascherano claims he is the only player who can start and finish a move, Xavi thinks he is better than anyone at every skill except goalkeeping but Thierry Henry perhaps sums up the ball wizard best:

"It is difficult to talk about Leo and put it into our words because he is not on our planet."

The little snatches of Messi himself speaking confirm he is not just an unlikely superstar but that he is probably even unaware he is one.

I was reminded of Donald Bradman, the greatest cricketing batsman but a bland and uninteresting interviewee. With the exception of Muhammad Ali, a sportsman's magic maybe never travels to the mouth.

While the subject matter is golden, the documentary as a whole stutters. The music is annoying, the editing sometimes frenzied and elsewhere slow and the insertion of chapters is awkward.

Guardiola mural near The Etihad in Manchester. — Guardiola mural near The Etihad in Manchester

What recommends it are some excellent, thought-provoking contributions. Players are rarely able to dissect tactics like Henry and Xavi do here, but then few get to play for Barcelona in the first place. The Camp Nou is no place for unintelligent men.

The moment in 2008 when Rijkaard left and Jose Mourinho was touted as a replacement was a fascinating fulcrum in the tiki-taka tale. It is easy to forget the Special One had worked at the Camp Nou from 1996 to 2000 and coached the Barcelona method to its youth sides.

We see a tantalising photo of Mourinho and Guardiola sitting side-by-side in Barcelona kit taking a break from training, but in the end the majority of the board got it right.

The Barcelona owners are like Olympian gods moving the pawns below and Guardiola's decline can be linked to Joan Laporta's replacement by Sandro Rosell in 2010.

Ten trophies in three seasons had been a thunderous start and Cruyff opined that Guardiola should have quit then, but he stayed and his rapport with his players as well as the directors began to wane.

When Barça beat Bilbao 3-0 to win the Copa del Rey in his last game in charge, the overriding feeling was of sadness, not jubilation.

The film ends with Xavi being pre-anointed as the next great Barça coach, buoyed by recommendations from Messi and others but as we know now that has not happened after the club made a hash of replacing Ernesto Valverde earlier this year.

Did we really see the greatest football team of all time ten years ago? For now we can just salute the golden age of Guardiola, who says only half-modestly,

"If after 25 years we are still talking about a book, then it's good."

In 2027 you can bet we will be.