Manchester City hit by physical and mental hurdles of Pep Guardiola's hyper-football

Guardiola's teams have often suffered springtime slumps but it may be a problem of complacency as much as fatigue

Pep Guardiola’s most frequently used expression during his time at Bayern Munich, according to Marti Perarnau’s Pep Guardiola: The Evolution, consisted of two words: “Never relax.”

“We have to be firing on all cylinders,” he told his players in the April of his final season at the Allianz Arena, long after his imminent departure for Manchester City had been announced. “At all times. At training, during every game, every minute of every day.”

That year, they were listening. Though elimination from the Champions League by Atletico Madrid at the semi-final stage was hard to digest, it was Bayern’s only defeat in the final two months of that 2015-16 campaign.

Guardiola’s side took nine wins and three draws from the other 12 games that closed that season and the Catalan claimed his third Bundesliga title in early May.

But this strong finish from a team “firing on all cylinders” is an anomaly in Guardiola’s post-Barcelona career and it was certainly not in-keeping with his first two years in Germany.

In the 2013-14 campaign, Bayern wrapped up the title in late March but then won just six of their final 13 games across all competitions. Defeats against Augsburg and Dortmund stung, but not as much as the humiliating 5-0 aggregate elimination from the Champions League by Real Madrid.

A year later, Bayern took just seven wins from their final 15 games, losing six. Three of those defeats came in the league after the title was won, but along with semi-final eliminations in both the Champions League and the DFB-Pokal, this still made for an unimpressive end to the campaign.

There is also Guardiola’s final year at Barcelona to consider, which did not end in a sustained slump, but instead with two key defeats. Four days after a 1-0 reverse at Stamford Bridge in the Champions League’s last four, a 2-1 defeat at the Nou Camp practically crowned Jose Mourinho’s Real Madrid as La Liga champions.

Even last year, City won three games out of 11 between early March and late April, before four wins from four made sure of a top-four spot. All told, around half of Guardiola’s seasons in charge of top clubs have ended with his team running out of steam, not with a bang but with a whimper.

Should we really be surprised, then, by this City side’s three successive defeats within the last fortnight? And to pose the obvious question, is their mini-slump a consequence of Guardiola’s intense, demanding hyper-football?

“The physical condition itself doesn’t exist,” was Guardiola’s interesting defence of his playing style on Friday. “Of course, it’s tough, the season,” he added, “but it’s tough for everybody, for all the teams in the Premier League.”

Somebody should perhaps tell Kevin de Bruyne that the ‘physical condition does not exist’, since he confessed to already feeling “like shit” in February. Hans-Wilhelm Muller-Wohlfahrt, the Bayern doctor who has accused Guardiola of ‘neglecting the medical profession’, would probably take an interest in such comments too.

But while dismissing tiredness as merely a state of mind is clearly ridiculous, Guardiola may have been right to suggest that City’s late-season slump cannot be solely attributed to fatigue. To illustrate his point better, he picked up an example from Tuesday’s defeat against Liverpool.

“You can understand, when they scored, Salah 1-1, it’s not a physical condition. It’s...” The City manager could not find the word he wanted in English so he settled for a loud exhalation, a big ‘ahh’.

The suggestion was that his players were not too tired to fight back after Salah’s goal, they just knew they were beaten.

Similarly, City were probably not too tired to track Paul Pogba as he dashed through their defence to head in an equaliser at the Etihad last Saturday, they just knew they were already champions.

It was clear. After that dominant opening 45 minutes in which they should have put four or five past their nearest challengers, City were absolutely assured of their own brilliance and, like Bayern at the end of those first two seasons under Guardiola, that can be when problems arise.

Guardiola said on Friday that he has not had to remind the players of what he expects, though his insistence that a collapse can still happen translated loud and clear as: ‘Guys, we have a job to finish’.

And then if his players need it spelling out any clearer, the Catalan always has his favourite two-word expression.