Page 133 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

hunger for titles; a player who on the pitch pushes his team-mates in a very positive way and, as
happened against Atlético de Madrid at the Nou Camp, is capable of body-slamming his coach to
celebrate a goal. Guardiola was shocked but ‘Samuel is like that’.
That version of the Cameroonian didn’t last all season.

Eto’o could be inspirational at times, in training and in matches, but with the occasional temper
tantrums, his impulsive nature and his inability to wholeheartedly accept Messi’s leadership, led
Guardiola to conclude once again that for the sake of balance among the group it would be better to
move him on. An incident in training at the start of 2009 confirmed Pep’s intuition. And another event
later that same season, made the decision to sell Eto’o non-negotiable.
This is how the Cameroonian explains the first incident, an insight into a brief moment that exposes
what both men stood for and precisely what separated them. It is one of those instances that brought to

Pep, with a rush of blood, the sudden realisation that their relationship was never going to work:
‘Guardiola asked me to do a specific thing on the pitch during practice, one that strikers are not
normally asked to do. I was neither excited nor aggressive, but I always think like a forward, and I
saw that I was unable to do what he was demanding. I explained to him that I thought he was wrong.
So then he asked me to leave the training session. In the end, the person who was right was me.
Guardiola never played as a forward and I always have. I have earned the respect of people in the

world of football playing in that position.’
The day after that incident, Pep asked Eto’o to go for dinner. Eto’o didn’t feel he needed to discuss
anything with his manager and rejected the invitation. There is a switch in Guardiola’s mind that
clicks on or off – if you are not with me, you shouldn’t be here. Loyal, devoted, when on the same
wavelength, and the coldest, most distant person if the magic disappears, if someone switches the
light off. It happened with Eto’o. And later with others.
Guardiola regularly started asking him to play wide right while Messi was accommodated in the

space normally occupied by a striker. During one game with those tactics, Samuel was replaced and
afterwards Pep broke with his rule to give the players their sacred space in the dressing room to
explain to the Cameroon striker his thinking behind the decision. Eto’o refused even to look at Pep.
He ignored the coach and carried on talking in French to Eric Abidal, whom he was sitting next to.
There was no way back for him after that. The team was going to progress giving freedom to
Messi, a battle lost by Eto’o. Following that clash, the forward even began celebrating the goals on

his own.
Three matches before the end of the domestic season, Barcelona won the title and Pep decided to
rest players from the usual starting eleven in the run-up to the Champions League final. This
collective need went against Eto’o’s individual interests to play in every game in order to have a
chance of winning the Ballon d’Or for the best European goalscorer of the year. Samuel Eto’o
pressured the coach to play him against Mallorca and Osasuna. Pep didn’t like his attitude and had to
bite his tongue when Samuel complained that, with Iniesta injured, and Xavi and Messi being kept

away, who could make passes and set up goals for him? Eto’o was slowly losing it, his rage
confusing the real targets of that season. In his mind, the explanation was simple: if Messi had been in
need of those goals, the decisions would have been different.
Samuel started the game against Osasuna. During half-time, he had a heated argument with Eidur
Gudjohnsen, almost leading to an exchange of blows: the striker thought the Icelander hadn’t passed
to him for a clear opportunity on goal. In the end, scoring was becoming an obsession that prevented

him from winning the Spanish League’s and Europe’s top scorer trophy for the second time, the same
thing that happened to him four years earlier in the last game of the campaign.