Champions League Defeat Cannot Disguise Qualities of Bayern Under Pep Guardiola

First things first. Manchester City are still very much in the Champions League thanks to a brave, committed display against, arguably, the best organised side in Europe, Pep Guardiola’s Bayern Munich.

Victory for City in their last match in Rome should be enough to earn them a place in the knockout stages unless CSKA Moscow do the unthinkable and win their last game at Bayern.

City’s attitude was fantastic with pressure and a high tempo being applied from the start, and it was not by chance that they scored, even though their second and third goals should have been prevented. A good performance all around for City, especially at the start of the game and the second half.

Football at the highest echelon is an ego-fuelled business with top-level sides sometimes being built around the quality of the best, most expensive players and not necessarily a footballing style which demands you always work as a unit.

Sometimes managers, including Manuel Pellegrini, will not necessarily demand certain players surrender their ego for the common good but rather allow them to show the world—more often than not—that the cream will rise to the top.

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Very often when you have the likes of Sergio Aguero, Yaya Toure (even though he was suspended for this game, the rule still applies), Jesus Navas and Vincent Kompany in your armoury, it is individual ability rather than systematic organisation which can make all the difference.

But this is normally more easily attained against lesser-quality opposition, which is certainly not a category where you will find the name of Bayern Munich.

This is most definitively not the way, nor the philosophy, of Guardiola at Bayern where, to a man, every single player has handed over his ego and effectively surrendered himself to the ideas of the genius Catalan coach.

I spent years watching Arjen Robben play and have never seen anything like the way he runs non-stop for the whole match very often without the ball.

This is a guy who, while at Real Madrid and also pre-Pep at Bayern, would barely break sweat on occasions. He is now working like a human dynamo, and the reason for that is because it’s what he has been told that he must do.

Franck Ribery, after Guardiola tried him for four weeks as a false nine or a No. 10, asked his manager to let him be just a winger. But against City, that’s precisely where Guardiola placed him—just behind Robert Lewandowski especially after Mehdi Benatia saw red in the 20th minute. And you could tell he is happy to do so these days.

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Lewandowski, meanwhile, has always said he wants to play as a No. 9 but now finds he has to spend quite a lot of time playing wide on the left and does so without complaint because he knows it is for the common good.

To be able to do that, you, as a coach, have to be so convincing and continuously so. The hardest job of all.

Irrelevant to the result of the Manchester City game, that is the reason why Bayern Munich are a world apart in football today.

It was not by chance that a Bayern side reduced to 10 men, with a rejuvenated Xabi Alonso being used as the glue which bound everything together, looked so comfortable for so long in a match where you occasionally felt compelled to count the number of German shirts to prove the visitors really did have one fewer player on the pitch than their opponents.

But football is frequently decided by the slimmest of margins and the strangest eventualities.

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Alonso’s wayward pass gave Aguero the chance to exhibit that magnificent individual quality I mentioned earlier, and City, fuelled by emotion, smelt blood, and when that happens, they can beat anyone in the world—Bayern included.

The headlines, of course, were all about Aguero’s hat-trick, but also worthy of mention was the inspirational performance of Pablo Zabaleta, who came on for Bacary Sagna and completely changed the face of the game with a spirited, close-to-the-edge display which could have seen him sent off but ultimately saw him inspire all around him to victory.

That said, Guardiola would not swap his multi-layered, adaptable, versatile team for any collection of individuals.

Fantastic movement without the ball, superiority with it, superstars like Lewandowski running themselves ragged for the common good and that old Guardiola trademark, namely an unquenchable thirst to regain possession once you’ve lost it, was wonderful to see.

It is a unique exercise in making an idea triumph above the individuals.

The simple fact is if you take the time to watch a game through coaching eyes, what we are seeing from Guardiola’s Bayern side at the moment is something truly special.