Is Guardiola Really Spectacular

With Guardiola’s treble legacy in Barcelona equaled he needs to conquer Europe with a less fanciful team to make his greatness enduring In the footballing world, Pep Guardiola, ever since achieving unprecedented success with Barcelona, has been viewed as an elite coach with almost no rival. In the four seasons he managed the Catalonian giant, Guardiola notched up 14 trophies while playing a brand of football that was aesthetic and philosophical. Barcelona under Guardiola’s tutelage, crafted a style of play, while not novel, was pure fantasy to the senses. His Barcelona side elevated possession and crisp passing-based football to a state of art like a beautiful Rembrandt painting donning the Louvre museum. But what made Guardiola’s legacy untouchable was that he won the treble for Barca in his first season as head coach, the crown jewel of his achievement. Until then, the Catalonian club had never achieved such feat of sweeping the two domestic competitions in Spain,together with the champions league in Europe, in one fell swoop season. Guardiola did it, and he did it in style. Hence a star was born. And to even make things interesting, the Catalan coach had achieved such at a relatively young age of 37.By the time he was leaving Barcelona, having clinched 14 titles in his first 4 years of being a head coach, the Catalan was viewed as a rare breed of a coach. The only other coach that had won so much within a short coaching period was Jose Mourinho. Then M

ourinho had won 20 trophies in 12 years. But While Mourinho and Guardiola are perceived as super coaches, placed on a pedestal akin to that of Messi and Ronaldo, there are many who still believe that the Catalan’s couching skills puts the Portuguese’s in the shade. And this is purely based on Guardiola’s mouthwatering achievement with Barcelona, where he had a formidable armada of gifted players, including the football wizard Lionel Messi, at his disposal. At Bayern, a club he took over in 2012 with an array of gifted players, Guardiola has successfully grafted his brand of philosophy on the club’s style of football. In his two seasons there, Guardiola has won three major trophies, doing a double of domestic competition in his first season. While this is impressive, it is in no way spectacular as Bayern had won a treble in their last season before the Catalan took over. Indeed Guardiola’s two seasons in Bayern so far have not been spectacular. But the spectacular legacy he left behind in Barcelona in his first season, which seemed unreachable, has now been rivaled. As Barcelona was crowned the champions of European club football at Berlin last week, which was their third major silverware in 2015, Guardiola’s legacy was breached by another Catalonia product in the person of Luis Enrique. Enrique had conjured a treble in his debut season for Barca taking the gilt of Guardiola’s gingerbread. But Enrique did so with a better winning rate, while his forward trio racked up more goals. In Guardiola’s debut season in Barcelona, his team won 42 out of 62 games while his frontline trio of Samuel Eto’o, Thierry Henry and Messi bagged 100 goals in the process. Impressive as that is, it still does not hold a candle to Enrique’s debut season in which he won 50 of 60 games, while his forward trio of Messi, Neymar and Suarez scored 122 goals,knocking Guardiola’s trio into a cocked hat. But a quick glance at Enrique’s coaching achievement, which was no great shakes before taking over Barcelona, throws up the real picture about Guardiola’s success that is often forgotten. Enrique started his career as head coach in Roma in 2011, but failed to qualify them for even the much maligned ugly step sister competition in Europe, the Europa league. That season, Roma finished seventh on the table, worse off than the previous when it finished sixth. The Spaniard, not pleased with his performance opted out of his two-year contract with Roma, moving to Celt Vigo, where his new Spanish club finished 9th on the table in 2014. In those two clubs, Enrique understandably did not do well as he had no straws to make bricks. Notwithstanding, Enrique became the head coach of Barcelona last year, a club bursting at the seams with elite straws and pronto, he made a brick of treble silverware at the end of his first season. This in a way throws a damper on Guardiola’s achievement proving that his spectacular success was really down to the raw materials, a cycle of exceptional players that Barcelona have had since 2006. Indeed any coach fielding a team with exceptionally talented players like Messi, Andres Iniesta, Xavi Hernandez, Sergio Busquets and Gerard Pique, has the ball at his feet But then, it can be argued that both Tito Vilanova and Tata Martino had these same set of raw materials at their disposable but underachieved. Quite true.In the case of Vilanova, his health problem proved a distraction for the club in his first and only season as Barca’s head coach, while Martino was a bull in a China shop as he was not steeped in the club’s footballing culture as Guardiola, Enrique and Villanova. While it would amount to grave injustice to conclude that Guardiola is not a great coach, he needs to take a club devoid of arrays of first class superstars to conquer Europe. After all, Mourinho his arch rival did it with Porto and Inter Milan. Only then and then will Guardiola’s greatness endure over generations.