Page 168 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

Pep simply answered all that back.
Xavi: The internal anger has to come out somehow. After we finished training, we were told that
he had said all that; my mobile was hot with text messages. In the hotel we watched the news and
there was Pep!

Villa: We weren’t watching it live as we had finished training, got changed, went to our rooms. But
by the time we went down for dinner we all knew. Before the boss returned from the press conference
we were buzzing.
Piqué: I got a message about it saying ‘Pep’s gone and done it’, and I thought, ‘what’s happened??’
because I hadn’t seen it. Spoke to my parents, who were in Madrid: ‘Wow, that was brilliant! It’s
about time someone gave it back to Mourinho,’ they said. It was a real confidence boost for the whole
team.

Xavi: We started watching the images of Pep’s press conference replayed on the TV and, as we
walked into the dining room of the hotel, our parents were rushing up to us and telling us: ‘Fucking
hell, you should have heard what Pep just said!’
Piqué: When Pep walked in afterwards we gave him a standing ovation. And Pep’s reaction was
like ‘What’s up?’ (as if to brush it off). His friends were there too, Trueba included.
David Trueba: Yeah, he got an ovation – which I think was more than just a show of support; it

was a message to Pep telling him not to feel beaten for having been sucked into Mourinho’s games.
Piqué: He must have felt bad about it because he isn’t like that. But it was necessary. He attacked
him directly, and this time, ‘well done!’ He’d thought about it and planned it. It came off wonderfully.
Villa: What Pep did, it did help the team, but I don’t think he did it to motivate us, rather so that he
himself felt good, got stuff out of his system and also in the process defended the players, the
technical staff and everyone who works with him.
Xavi: Ah, sometimes you need to give it back and it was perfect on that occasion because it was as

if Pep took the lid off a bottle of fizz and he released all the tension that had been building up; it really
lightened and lifted the mood.
Piqué: Sometimes I feel like answering back too, I’m not made of stone. But Pep taught us that he
prefers respect, humility, demonstrating it on the pitch, you don’t need to do so in a press conference
... Respect for the rival is essential, but if they are attacking you all the time, in the end you have to
answer back. A line had been crossed and if you don’t answer back you look silly.

Pep was feeling more vulnerable without Laporta, and with Rosell acting with discretion, but he
couldn’t show it. What he actually did for the first time as a coach was try and win the game in the
press conference. He wanted to act upon this melancholic state the club had fallen into at that moment,
to turn it around, to show people that he wasn’t scared or daunted by the task of facing up to his
team’s nemesis after losing to them in the cup. His was a statement of intent, as if to say, ‘I’ll take
care of Mourinho’; the players could take care of their opponents on the pitch, the directors could
deal with their counterparts and the journalists could fight between themselves – Guardiola, in the

meantime, knew what he had to do.
The stereotypical Catalan attitude, the idea that ‘if something can go wrong, it will’, throwing the
towel in, generally being pessimistic, could have taken over. He wanted to transmit to his team and
the fans the idea of ‘Sí, podemos!’ – ‘Yes, we can!’ The mood changed.
After the evening meal in the hotel, and in keeping with the new-won confidence, goalkeeper
Víctor Valdés surprised the squad with a home-made video filmed at the training ground hours after

the Copa del Rey final defeat.
The team were expecting a motivational film in preparation for the two tough Clásicos ahead. But