Pep Guardiola was making his way back from an event in support of Palestine when his new assistant, Pep Lijnders, was offered the stage to impart the wisdom behind a changing Manchester City to the world.
Lijnders will forever be characterised by Jurgen Klopp’s loud, full throttle heavy metal, whereas Guardiola was once fond of whiling away afternoons in his office listening to the jazz of Sade with former No 2, Domenec Torrent.
When Guardiola enquired about Lijnders on the phone to Klopp last summer, what he did was begin the process of blending these two styles together. There is the potential for this to be a super group, a mix of ideas that suits the Premier League’s changing melodies.
Lijnders was given the room to discuss this late last month in his manager’s absence. As arguably the most eye-catching new recruit of the rebuild, quite something given City’s £430million outlay on signings in the past year, his thoughts were going to illuminate a debate on the extent of their evolvement that started, at its most basic, with suggestions that City had just gone ‘more direct’.
‘The mindset of Pep and the idea never changed,’ he said of Guardiola. The ideal is still death by a thousand passes if at all possible but the way this league is, that is just not achievable anymore. Lijnders explained this expertly, saying that whereas in the past, opposition would choose either to press high and take their chances or retreat in a low block, they now do both. ‘You have two games in one,’ he said.
City have been attempting to make sense of this over time – and definitely not just this season. There has been a shift towards recruiting more transitional players, starting with the summer of 2023 with Matheus Nunes, Jeremy Doku and Mateo Kovacic’s arrivals. In their own way, all of them operate in straighter lines than a traditional Guardiola player.
Pep Lijnders has helped reshape Manchester City with Pep Guardiola since joining the club
City would have been out of sight at Liverpool were it not for wastefulness before Erling Haaland’s dramatic winner
They saw the trend and reacted to it. Muscle memory of winning and their fear factor were key components in the title in 2024 before everything fell away last season. Now, the ideas – the ‘processes’ as Guardiola calls them – are beginning to take shape. You see that with the abundance of missed chances over the last month and how City have dominated games without winning many.
The possession statistics are nine per cent down on what they were four years ago, when false nines were the ace up Guardiola’s tactical sleeve. And yet that is incremental rather than a drastic drop, pointing to a theme. Direct attacks per match are broadly the same, ‘direct speed’ – basically how quickly they move towards goal in possession – is only slightly quicker. Their average percentage of long passes, somewhere around six per cent, is actually smaller than in 2021-22. Figure that one out.
‘It’s more about what teams do to us and how to counter-attack that, basically,’ Lijnders said. ‘Do we want to attack quick when the pitch is open? Yes. Do we want to play a lot of passes when the pitch is closed? Yes of course, because you need to disorganise them.’
Anfield, whether it is Klopp or Arne Slot, was the perfect arena to determine how strong City’s ideas around this are.
To watch them carve Liverpool open in the 17th minute, starting from the goalkeeper, was the perfect blend of both facets. Gianluigi Donnarumma, not renowned for his footwork, baited a press and Abdukodir Khusanov – whose ability on the ball was questioned early in his City career – carried it 40 yards. Space opened up, into Antoine Semenyo and then intricacy with Erling Haaland before Omar Marmoush swivelled and saw a shot blocked. In a matter of seconds, City went back to front while utilising supreme skill in small pockets.
It’s exactly what Guardiola and Lijnders – who was apparently a padel partner of Steven Gerrard in the days leading up to this historic victory – are working towards and the pair embraced. It’s what has been happening for some time but without sticking the ball in the net, that counts for nothing.
Still there is room for much improvement in that regard and City might have been out of sight by the break again, but for wastefulness.
‘In the boxes you have to take a coffee, as a defender and as a striker,’ Guardiola said, reflecting on their first-half display. ‘And we are so ‘urgh’, all the actions, always arrive one metre before or one metre later, never in the (correct) spot.’
But then came two moments at Anfield when they were on the spot. The two Peps want so many more.
