Page 40 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

session ahead of FC Barcelona’s final home game against Celta Vigo when, following an extremely
heated discussion between Cruyff and vice-president Joan Gaspart in the coach’s office at the Camp
Nou, the man who had led Barcelona to the most successful period in their history was sacked.
The Dutchman would not have continued beyond the end of that season, but had wanted to see out

the remaining two games and leave with some dignity in the summer. The falling-out denied him that
opportunity and his discovery that the club had already made a move to appoint Sir Bobby Robson as
his successor heaped further humiliation upon him. Guardiola preferred, during that convulsive
period, to act like most players would do – watch from a distance as everything fell apart.
In the first game of the post-Cruyff era, the Nou Camp was filled with banners supporting the Dutch
coach, thanking him for all the success he had brought to the club. The club was divided between
supporters of Cruyff and those of Núñez. In the end, even the man who had changed the history of

Barcelona cracked under the intense pressure at the club, the behind-the-scenes conflicts and his
deteriorating relationship with the board. Cruyff was gone, yet one of his most enduring legacies
remained in the form of Pep Guardiola, a spindly young central midfielder who became both icon and
embodiment of the philosophies that the Dutchman had set in motion.
After Cruyff came Sir Bobby Robson, a jovial sixty-three-year-old manager who rapidly earned
the nickname ‘Grandad Miquel’ (the star of an advertisement for cheap wine) among the senior

players. Robson never grasped the Spanish language or his players, but he suffered unfair
comparisons to the Dutch master, whose shadow would have eclipsed anybody.

One of Sir Bobby Robson’s first training sessions at the Nou Camp. Late morning,
1996

One morning soon after his arrival, Sir Bobby Robson used a piece of chalk to scrawl his tactics on
the dressing-room floor, with José Mourinho duly translating Robson’s English into Spanish. The
players looked on and exchanged bewildered glances with each other as the old man knelt down

before them making unintelligible squiggles on the floor. It was at that moment, right at the beginning
of his tenure, that he lost the changing room and as the season progressed a form of self-management
evolved among the players. Frequently, Mourinho would translate the words of Robson, then add
extra, clearer instructions – quite a lot extra sometimes. Pep and José quickly identified each other as
football people and the pair connected, talked and took coaching decisions among themselves. Quite
possibly it was something that happened less frequently than José likes to admit it did, yet perhaps

happened more often than Pep is prepared to own up to these days.
Guardiola has written in My People, My Football: ‘Charly Rexach always said that in order to be
a trainer you have to think 30% about football and the rest about everything surrounding the team:
about the environment ... And I only understood it the year Robson was with us. I came from another
school of football. I was so used to Cruyff’s methods that I assumed all the coaches were like him.
Robson thought we had to be different and it wasn’t what I expected. He was right though, but in the
process we lost three or four months. It was too late. In football you have to be brave. Always. If we

just complain, we’re dead. Action must be taken, always bearing in mind commitment to the common
goal. Both Robson and the players were fighting for the same cause: Barça. But by the time our
thoughts and his met along the way, it was too late. That synchrony was interpreted as self-
management.’
Pep might call it a synchrony and claim that the suggestion that it was a case of ‘self-management’