Page 104 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

propelling him down the touchline, his fists clenched and his face alight with euphoria, as if he’d lost
control. Till Silvinho stopped him to ask him to do a substitution to lose some key seconds. He let
himself be a footballer again for a second. Suddenly he stopped, turned around, contained himself and
began, once more, to shout instructions.

‘Iniesta taught me at Stamford Bridge to never write anything off. Improbable is not impossible ...
you have to believe,’ Pep recalls. ‘If his kick was unstoppable it’s ’cause it was loaded with the will
of the whole of the Barcelona fans.’
When the game ended, he proceeded to hug everybody, all of the players, the staff. At that moment
he was both player and coach. Valdés came to him and got hold of him, shook him and shouted
something in his face that he cannot remember. The heart was coming out of Pep. The whole team
exploded like never before, not even at the Bernabéu. Everyone was going haywire. The biggest hug

was with Iniesta to whom Pep must have mentioned what he later said in the press conference:
‘Bloody hell, the one who never scores was the one with the goal.’
Not long before that crucial goal, Iniesta asked Pep for a few minutes. ‘Give me your opinion,
boss. I don’t score enough, what should I do?’ Pep started to laugh: ‘You asking me? Me? I didn’t
score more than four goals in the whole of my career! What do I know!’
There is such a fine line between success and failure, as Pep likes to repeat to his footballers.

Barcelona were going to play in the Champions League final against Manchester United in Rome.
They had reached another pinnacle in a year that had turned out to be a glorious one.
A couple of days later, Guardiola took his children to school, as he does almost every morning.
The pupils, many of whom were wearing Barcelona shirts, looked out of the classroom windows,
while others went out into the school yard to applaud Pep’s arrival. ‘Why are they clapping, Papa?’
asked his son Màrius. ‘Because they’re happy, son,’ he replied. The Espanyol fans among the
children who sometimes challenged and taunted him about the result of the next Catalan derby were

suddenly nowhere to be seen.
Barcelona were leaving a lot of their complexes behind; they weren’t ashamed to assert themselves
and bask in their happiness. As many people noted, the supporters rarely flocked to Canaletes, the
fountain where Barcelona victories were enjoyed, without having a title to celebrate. But they were
rejoicing over the six goals against Madrid, Iniesta’s super strike against Chelsea and their
acceptance of a style of play.

It was all about being proud of what Guardiola and his boys were producing.

In 2009 Barcelona won a sextet of titles, a record that had been achieved by no other team in history.
They won everything they competed for in a calendar year: the Liga, the Copa del Rey against
Athletic de Bilbao, the Champions League, the Spanish Super Cup, the European Super Cup and the
World Club Championship. Those victories made Barcelona, statistically at least, the greatest team of
all time, ahead of the Celtic of 1967, the Ajax of 1972, PSV Eindhoven of 1988 and Manchester
United of 1999. Those four teams that had previously won the treble: the league, the cup and the
European Cup. Pedro (‘he was playing in the third division the other week!’ as Pep reminded him
every week – partly said with admiration, partly with caution) scored in every one of those

competitions, another unprecedented feat. In the 2008–9 season Guardiola’s team played eighty-nine
games and only lost eight, four of which were all but insignificant and none was lost by more than one
goal.
The year had shown on occasions that everything is relative: ‘By doing the same, things may not