There are quite a few Pep Guardiola memes, but one of the more prevalent is, well, him being nice about another manager.
“He will have success,” he said on Friday, when asked about under-pressure Southampton manager Russell Martin. “If you start to change your ideas, normally the players will notice and will know you’re not a big believer.
“The results are coming. They always have good moments — against Brentford, Man United in the first half an hour, Leicester. They have the courage to play.”
It did not go down well in some quarters, partly because the general discourse around Martin is that he should change his style of play because his possession-based philosophy is yet to yield a Premier League victory.
When managers like Martin find themselves in that situation, the overall public view — rightly or wrongly — is ‘this guy is bad’, so when Guardiola says, ‘this guy is good’, it is easy to believe he is not being serious.
Guardiola, by his own admission, can go a little overboard with his praise at times, and then there is the fact that whenever Guardiola praises a manager in this kind of scenario, the next day his Manchester City side normally destroy their opponents. Therefore, some regard the comments as false praise, while others simply take it as a sign that a huge City victory is incoming.
Those lines of thinking do not take into account that City beat most teams regardless of who their manager is — they have not lost at the Etihad Stadium now for two years, whether teams play out from the back, park the bus, or a mixture of the two. Yet it is an idea that has stuck and it came to the fore around City’s clash with Southampton this weekend.
As it turned out, most of Guardiola’s post-match press conference on Saturday was about Southampton, although it also told us a lot about himself.
He had already told broadcasters after his side’s 1-0 victory that he is “going to learn a lot with Russell because they did really well”, so when he sat down in front of the written media he was asked if his comment was genuine, in the sense that most of us laymen would not expect such an experienced manager to learn from somebody much younger.
“Absolutely,” he said. “I am a big believer in the process for the build-up, I prefer my players to get the ball to their feet and not to the teeth. And when that happens it is because they make an incredible process. We were not sloppy, we were not flat and if we struggled to regain the ball it is because they were really, really good.
“First of all I am a spectator and when I see the opponent doing things that I like to do with my team, and they do it really well but they struggle… I just make a compliment.”
There are countless examples of Guardiola praising under-fire managers over the years, and the basic point is that, if anything, he is just being nice, and wants to avoid making a colleague’s job tougher.
Whenever he has been asked about under-pressure Manchester United managers, for example, he will try to avoid joining a pile-on, although there is not always quite so much praise because, well… they do not play the style that he appreciates.
And that is obviously a major part of this.
It would be a little unwise to go back over all the names to see who came out of it well and who did not because that will include dozens or unique situations, but whether it is Marcelo Bielsa or Mikel Arteta (when his Arsenal side were losing heavily and he was getting the Martin treatment), there is at least a theme: they play the kind of football that Guardiola admires.
One of the things we know about Guardiola is that he would rather lose a match his way than win one somebody else’s — in fact, if he is disingenuous about any style, it is probably when he insists he does not judge the teams that put 11 men behind the ball.
And while it might be hard to remember, there have been plenty of times during his career, in Germany and in England, where Guardiola’s own style has been criticised, or he has been asked if he might be better off if he changed his approach.
“No, no, I’m not going to change,” he said during his first season in charge at City, when results were not going well.
“If it’s not going well in the future, next season isn’t going well playing that way, I will go home.
“I’m sorry guys. I won 21 titles in seven years. So it’s three titles per year playing in that way.”
So by defending other managers he is not just being nice, but he is, in a way, defending the broad church of possession football, and his answers are probably fuelled by the times in the past when he himself has faced the same criticisms. Maybe there is an annoyance that these narratives are still being pushed, just not in his direction.
“The people judge results, not intentions. The same guy, three months ago, got incredible compliments because he was promoted from the Championship to the Premier League, and he is the same guy, with the same principles.”
Naturally, Guardiola told Martin this after the match.
“Pep congratulated us on the way the team looked and the way it plays,” the Saints boss said afterwards. “It’s not easy to play that way and he probably understands that more than anyone.”
It is curious that managers who are struggling to get results but play a more traditionally British style never get asked to change, to learn what is a new way of coaching and abandon what they have spent years doing. That is reserved for those managers who deploy styles of play that today’s television pundits never experienced during their careers.
Martin articulated very well his own experiences, and why he is not going to yield.
“If I end up losing my job at some point, at least I can look at myself and know that I have stuck to what I want and who I want to be as a person and also as a leader and a manager in terms of the idea on the pitch.
“There is no right or wrong way, but this way is right for me because of how I see the game and how I would have liked to have play the game, and what I believe in, and also my skill set in trying to deliver said product on the pitch. That’s why we got a job here in the first place, so to then get to the Premier League and change would be completely illogical to me, and whatever level it would be.”
No wonder Guardiola is on board.
(Top photo: Matt Watson/Southampton FC/Getty Images)
