Robin van Persie is a big fan of Josep Guardiola. The former attacker can only remember three games from his active career in which he felt that his team had no chance and twice Guardiola’s Barcelona was the opponent. Van Persie points out that the Spaniard has now also realized that a different playing style with a different team than his Barcelona team at the time is necessary to win the Champions League. “I call this the next level of the trainer Guardiola.”
Guardiola has never been closer to winning the Champions League after his time in Barcelona than this season with Manchester City and that, according to Van Persie, is because the Spaniard has moved away from his ideal image. After all, things have always gone wrong at crucial moments in recent years. “He always played very offensive and high on the field, so vulnerable in the last line. He simply did not have the defenders who could play with so much space in their back at that level and the world strikers who faced this were eager to use this, ”says Van Persie on Friday. The Telegraph.
Guardiola has now made sure that his players are already thinking about what to do when the ball is lost, regardless of who has the ball. “Yet he still brings much more attractive football than any other coach. What I find very interesting is that he has been playing without a striker for a long time. I have never seen that before in my life with a team! ”, Emphasizes the former the Dutch international. “Pep bets on running players who need to become strikers. At times the team misses a point of contact. That’s the downside of the system. But in the remaining defense, as it is called, they are better at Manchester City. ”
Van Persie calls Guardiola’s Barcelona ‘extreme’. “They were still two levels higher than us”, he refers to his period at Arsenal, which alternated a 2-1 victory over the Catalans with, for example, a 4-1 defeat by four goals from Lionel Messi. “How? The pressure and the game without the ball was so great at Barcelona. ” With really good teams you can see the coach’s philosophy reflected in the team, Van Persie emphasizes. “Pep put down his team so well that you as an opponent got the feeling that you were the underlying party. As a football player you have the feeling that it is higher mathematics for his team. ”
“What Barça controlled at the time was playing from the stand.” Van Persie can still remember well that the outside world thought that Barcelona was challenging if they took the lead. “Then they started luring you. Then it really became tikitaka. People often didn’t understand that, thought Barcelona was challenging. But what those players did was create space. It was just the end of the story for you as an opponent. You had the idea that you ended up in one big rondo. ”
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