Manchester United vs Manchester City: For all his pretty words, Pep Guardiola cannot halt the looming storm

Don't be fooled by the Catalan's calm exterior - a visceral competitor lies beneath and it won't be long before his fierce rivarly with Mourinho is back in full swing

The calm before the storm - Manchester holds its breath as Guardiola and Mourinho prepare for Saturday's showdown (Getty)

Any discussion of the choreography of Manchester’s two press conferences must be viewed in the context of Jose Mourinho’s conversation with senior executives at Chelsea in the early autumn of 2013.

He had just arrived as manager for a second time and they told him he shouldn’t be seen as the enemy of football any more and should stop picking his fights. Mourinho was receptive.

He accepted that would no longer feed a media Punch and Judy show and a few months of benign press appearances ensured. Within six months he was waging unholy war with Arsene Wenger, officialdom and anyone else who wanted to take him. For a view of how rivalry is lived and felt by individuals like Mourinho, you need to be in the press room from February onwards. That’s when the pips squeak.

The same applies to Pep Guardiola, whose calm exterior also belies the visceral competitor beneath. It was put to him on Friday that his father, Valenti, had told a journalist last year that his son has a deep hatred of losing. He smiled and said that was wrong. “My father is a nice person. Sometimes he don’t tell the truth,” he observed, going on to suggest that losing was part of the territory, too. “I love to win but I don’t hate to lose. It is part of my job. It can happen. Tomorrow is not a final. The world never stops tomorrow…”

“Did you speak to my father too?” he asked, perhaps slightly nervously, when a Spanish writer shaped up to speak and you sensed that the truth was out. Valenti had spoken with a little more candour than Pep had wanted.

It was Guardiola who offered comfortably the most fascinating of the two pre-match discussions which symbolically started at precisely the same time, five miles across town from each other. Mourinho, the master chorographer of these Premier League occasions, kept a tight lid on things, though Guardiola did not entirely disguise the philosophical divide.

This revealed itself when he was asked what winning Saturday’s derby would mean to him. “It depends on the way we play,” he said. “I believed in the past and I believe now and until the last day of my career, I believe you have to play good to win…. I want the ball, I want to attack as much as possible, I want to control the game and I want to concede few counter-attacks. To try to play good…”

It is the characterisation of Guardiola’s own brand of football as ‘good’ and his own as something less than that which drills a hole into Mourinho’s head, where the Catalan is concerned.

Mourinho's and Guardiola's rivalry will be defined by their Manchester derby battle over the next three years (Getty)

Guardiola’s willingness to engage in discussion on the nature of the rivalry made the 20 minutes in his company absorbing. It has become customary in these Premier League occasions over the past few years for conversation on a difficult subject to be shut down when it doesn’t go away. Yet when it was put to him that his rivalry with Mourinho was akin to that of Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna, or Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, he was willing to take it on.

“Come on! Both of us are really good like these kind of people? Come on! Jose and I don’t play, so I'm sorry, so when you play Lendl and McEnroe, Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, or Federer and Nadal or Djokovic, that is important. We don’t play. We have to come here [to talk to the media] but this game belongs to the players. It doesn’t belong to me or to Jose, Arsene or all the big managers.

"In the end, what we are, we speak through our players, through our games, it when we are talking here. So, believe me, it's on the pitch, with the players, the bigger stars. The people go to Old Trafford tomorrow, not to see me and Jose on the side, but to see all the big fantastic players on the field…”

It was an intelligent way to shape the discourse that he had arrived here armed with – that managers are subsidiary to the main battle waged. That, too was a little disingenuous, of course. Read Andres Iniesta’s description of Guardiola’s painfully difficult early weeks at Barcelona and you see why.

The team had lost 1-0 in Soria to Numancia, a nothing team, on the first day of the season, then drawn with Racing Santander, so he holed himself up in his office in the basement of the Nou Camp, “rewinding an relaying the videos, re-reading his notes, wondering what to change” as the book puts it, when Iniesta walked in.

The point of the story was Iniesta telling Guardiola to stick to his principles because “Vamos de puta madre” (‘We’re in great shape. We’re playing bloody brilliantly’) But it certainly deconstructs the idea, presented by Guardiola, that his part might be in any way ancillary. He is obsessed with winning.

The illusion was enhanced on this occasion by the fact that the Catalan moved so noiselessly. The calm assurance and understatement took his voice so low that at times that it was difficult to make out what he said. His English and his self-confidence have both picked up since the last time his profile was as searing as this: his introduction as manager.

Beneath a cool exterior, Guardiola is driven by the uncompromising desire to win (Getty)

He doused the heat of the occasion with an extended paean to the significance of Catalonia Day, on Sunday, and why it is so important to him. He has apparently never celebrated it outside of Catalonia. Guardiola put himself on first name terms with his adversary, too, because they were both starting out together. He was and “I think with Jose it is the same. We need time, having to try to do the things we are good at...”

But it was when he described the supreme physical threat which his City side face on Saturday that he revealed the vast cultural divide which all his pretty words cannot hide. “The set pieces with tall guys is impossible to control so they are a top team…,” he said, gazing towards the ceiling. It is a ‘top’ team he thinks he is facing, rather than a ‘good’ team. The men and their managers are polar opposites and the storm will come soon enough.