Pep Guardiola is teaching everyone a lesson by saving Man City’s season

City’s year has not gone to plan but Guardiola’s creativity has shone through – other managers should take note

Pep Guardiola has devised many a winning strategy, some much admired, some much imitated. Yet this was not the plan, or even close to being the plan. “If you tell me at the beginning of the season that at the end of the season you are fighting for the FA Cup final or to qualify for the Champions League with Nico [O’Reilly] and Matheus [Nunes] at full-back I'd say, ‘What are you talking about?’” he said.

The plan was Josko Gvardiol and Kyle Walker, one among the most expensive defenders in history, the other one of the defining right-backs of his generation. Not an attacking midfielder from the youth system who had not made a senior appearance before this season and a £50m misfit of a midfielder. At the start of the campaign, neither ranked in Guardiola’s top four options for the positions they now occupy.

But then the plan in attack was to build around a No 9 with the potential to break goalscoring records. Instead, Guardiola, the manager who did more than anyone else to revive the tactic of the false nine, arguably isn’t even using one of those as much as two No 10s and two wingers.

Guardiola celebrates Man City’s late win over Aston Villa on Tuesday night (Getty)

Erling Haaland is injured, Walker is on loan at AC Milan and Gvardiol is playing at centre-back. If many a Guardiola team evolves over a season, this one feels more like revolution. This, however, is a reflection of this being no normal year.

Guardiola is open that it has been, in his words, a “bad season”, and still will be even if City win the FA Cup and finish in the top five. His original plans were faulty: he underestimated the rebuild needed, overestimated the staying power of some of his ageing powers, leaving his squad strangely short-staffed at defensive midfielder and centre-forward, beyond a talisman in each position.

Guardiola came to his current strategy more by accident than design, yet should it succeed on two fronts, it will be a triumph of improvisation and adaptability as well as a failure of his initial blueprint for the campaign.

Since the start of March, O’Reilly, with four, is City’s top scorer. Nunes’s 94th-minute winner against Aston Villa on Tuesday may prove the most significant goal of their Premier League campaign. If full-backs have taken up the goalscoring responsibilities, there is a void in the centre of the attack, where Haaland would have been.

Without Erling Haaland and Rodri, Guardiola has altered City’s formation (Getty)

Guardiola’s rejig has entailed using the man who seemed to be Haaland’s deputy, the January signing Omar Marmoush, on the left, and benching Phil Foden, who had seemed Plan B in attack, while Kevin De Bruyne and Ilkay Gundogan operate as No 10s in a 4-2-2-2 formation in which the most advanced players are the wide men.

There is a short-termism to it: with De Bruyne in the final few games of his glorious City career, with a box midfield of four thirty-somethings. A policy of safety in numbers, including Bernardo Silva and Mateo Kovacic, may be a way of compensating for physical decline or simply underlining Guardiola’s love of midfielders.

His relationship with full-backs is odder. Some of the men he has selected there for City have been midfielders by trade, such as Fabian Delph and Oleksandr Zinchenko. There was a shift towards those, like Gvardiol, Nathan Ake, John Stones and Manuel Akanji, who were more centre-backs; in some cases exclusively, until Guardiola reimagined them. There was a case that Walker was the only specialist full-back in the City squad, until he decamped to Italy. Rico Lewis was the closest thing to another but Nunes and O’Reilly have a running power he lacks, enabling them to power past the pensionable midfield. De Bruyne can create – and, rewinding the years, he is – while they run.

Rico O’Reilly has scored big goals in the FA Cup and the league (Getty)

City’s last 10 goals have come from eight different players, a model Guardiola probably likes even though his greatest feats have been built on the back of remarkable numbers from Lionel Messi and Haaland.

This setup won’t last, not least because De Bruyne will go and Haaland and Rodri will return. It doesn’t need to, though. In a season when many of Guardiola’s attempts to find a way to win have looked flawed after a few games, when players have veered in and out of the team as his strategies have shifted, he only needs it to work for six more domestic matches.

This is not the all-conquering formula of the treble, with John Stones in his hybrid role, or the devastating brilliance of the false-nine formation at its best, or his first great City side, with its twin free eights and flying wingers.

Guardiola has sent his wingers further forward, with twin No 10s playing centrally (Getty)

It is a mix of young and old, the men who have struggled in other positions and those not trusted to play in their preferred role. It is an attempt to make the most out of a bad situation that lesser managers than Guardiola will understand. It could bring an FA Cup win and a top-five finish with a lineup that, in years to come, may require a little research to ascertain precisely who was playing where and why.

But it has been testament to the creativity of Guardiola, a manager who sometimes seems to have too many ideas but who saw his supposed masterplan break down. But he may be offering a lesson too. This season has been a failure for management’s inflexible ideologues. Yet Guardiola has never been one of them. The plan wasn’t for a 4-2-2-2 with O’Reilly and Nunes as full-backs. Come August, it might not be again. For now, Guardiola is just trying to find a way to win with what he has got.