Please don’t cock this up, Pep; we need you

There is quite a deep well of antipathy to Pep Guardiola in the English media, and, one must presume, that reflects many fans’ views too.

As I discussed three months agothere exists a ‘Fraudiola’ phenomenon, which is looking to be unimpressed at any and every sign of the Spaniard not being 100% perfect, 100% of the time. Tabloid journalists like John Cross on Sunday Supplement have said how “disappointed” they are in him because he was supposed to be so revolutionary and yet Manchester City are not playing very well.

Sad to say, there’s a nasty bile-coloured xenophobic streak in English culture which is never happier than when it is spitting, sometimes literally, in the face of people Not From Round Here and those who they think don’t know the league. Pep’s work so far is only giving those people ammunition.

Anything that gives credence to their vapid, populist-seeking worldview must be resisted at all times. The trouble is that this can lead you into positions and thoughts which are set to oppose their view, rather than reflect reality. In other words, we look to support Guardiola, even when he’s messing the whole thing up, rather than criticise him, because we know John Cross et al are “disappointed”.

Watching Manchester City on Sunday, and at other points this season, Pep has made it extremely easy to be critical of him because he’s trying to get a set of players to play a type of football that they can’t yet play very well, at least some of the time. And it’s his assertion of a philosophy – an awful word in relation to football – over pragmatism, that is unravelling the season for him.

There are two ways of looking at this. Do you try to elevate your players to a new level by implementing your fabulously successful methods (methods you have, after all, been employed on ludicrous wages to deploy) and simply stick to that idea, regardless of results and hope it just gets better eventually? Or do you look at the players you have and create a way of playing that suits them best, at least until you get the leaden, dummkopfs out and the snake-hipped perky young dancers in?

Obviously, John Stones has become the poster boy for this dilemma. Is he being educated to be a play-it-out-at-all-costs defender who will become one of the best of his generation, or is he being asked to do something he just can’t do that well? I feel for the lad when I watch him because you know and appreciate that he wants to do a Cruyff turn in his own box, beat the attacker and move away gracefully. I totally get that the boy wants to be a cross betwixt Franz Beckenbauer and Paolo Maldini, and I admire it. But it keeps going wrong so often that you get this knot of dread in your guts every time he receives the ball in the last third, and you just hope this time he’s going to get some sodding snow on the thing. Then again, a large amount of learning on the job is inevitable, so perhaps you see his patchy form as an evolutionary process.

Is it admirable to stick to a notion that isn’t really working that well in the belief that all the players will eventually get with the programme, or is it really bloody stupid? After all, it’s only five months into the Guardiola tenure. Rome, nor indeed Barcelona, wasn’t built in a day. Not being brilliant immediately is all too often seen as failure in the sensationalist, instant reaction culture we live in. But then, when Everton are shafting you until you’re numb, sticking to your ‘philosophy’ looks like monumental self-indulgence.

I like freaks and weirdos who the Soccer Saturday Straights of the world can’t understand, and for some of the football public and even more of the fetid press, Guardiola is one of those. It’s also enjoyable to see someone just say, in effect, “it’s my way or the highway”. So I loathe it even more when said freako gives that element of the audience an excuse to exercise their dumb upon him. If you’re going to be a football aesthete, hovering above the game like a yogic flyer, you’ve got to deliver the goods because eccentricity always just looks like old-fashioned madness if you don’t win.

Given that winning anything outside of the Premier League is pretty much decried by some of the reactionary English football media as an inferior achievement, Guardiola being “disappointing” was to be expected. Had he won 21 trophies in England, all of this critique would be off-limits. But he’s Spanish and he got rid of Joe Hart and replaced him with someone foreign with a silly surname who wasn’t Joe Hart. This gave the disappointed press another stick to beat Pep with, a stick dipped in the red and white of the cross of St George. Poor Joe, forced to play in Italy and getting kicked in the face as a reward.

But even so, as much as many of us can’t bear the sniggering and ‘I told you so’s’ that have been waiting to be thrown at him since day one, there is a good argument to say that Pep is cocking up his first season here.

The critics say he has basically had his pants pulled down by a more competitive league than he’s used to. I don’t want to agree with that, but it does look a little like that, right now. A central midfield that would be faster if you pushed them around in a wheelbarrow doesn’t help, nor does the “we’re too classy to boot it long” idea. After all, if you keep getting caught in possession, you might as well lose it further up the pitch by hitting a few long balls.

Today is not yesterday. You are not right now, just because you’ve been right before. One thing is for sure, Guardiola is having to cope with the dynamics and pressures of high-profile defeat and it is bound to be a testing time for him. But don’t let us down, Pep. Don’t prove the sulphurous unpleasants that orbit our football planet right. Don’t let them be right when they say “he’s underestimated the league” or that “it ain’t like Germany or Spain, Jeff…blah blah blah”.

You haven’t got this whole thing wrong have you? Please don’t say you have. We were relying on you to be a clever sod, wearing expensive, lightweight knitwear, but you’re ten points behind Chelsea, outside of the Champions League places and have already lost five games. You’ve got to do something about it, or all of us who supported you, who said you really did know the challenges of the Premier League, will look as stupid as you.

John Nicholson