Manchester City will not win the Champions League this season: Novack Djokovic
Man City scraped through in Champions League
Manchester City will not win the Champions League this season. There, I’ve said it. Somebody had to.
As City clambered desperately aboard the last lifeboat off the titanic climax to UEFA’s catchily-named League Phase, the other survivors all cursed quietly under their breath. Nobody wants Guardiola in Friday’s bracket draw.
But why? Is there any other club among the last 24 standing that has presided over defeat in half the games his team have played since October? On recent form, City are the punch-bags of the knockout round and Pep looks increasingly like he’s just gone a round or two with Oleksandr Usyk.
And yet there is something about the serial winners in sport that haunts anyone bold or brave enough to challenge them. It’s the ghostly shadow that Novak Djokovic cast over Melbourne for a few days last week. Oh no, not him again!
If Tiger Woods somehow limped to the 1st tee at Augusta in April and birdied the opening hole, the rest of the Masters field would look up at the giant scoreboard and collectively mutter ‘damn! He’s back!’ The greatest compliment you can pay Manchester City is that – even without form or hard evidence – nobody dare write them off. They are through to the next squid game and that’s all that counts.
Nobody is suggesting that City’s dramatic downturn is Guardiola’s fault, but it’s happened on his watch and he knows it and has taken ownership of it. The strange thing about his team’s winning spree is that there is not much to say about City when they are regularly, routinely gathering victories and trophies. Now we are all talking about them.
There have been times during the last few fantastic years when Pep has been curtly rude and short with interviewers, but in recent weeks he has been openly confessional and self-critical. You don’t have to read too far between the lines to see that City’s travails are taking a personal toll on his health and private life. The new contract that he signed out of the blue in November felt like a selfless act of loyalty, rather than a career move. He doesn’t need my sympathy but my admiration for him grows.
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This essay is not meant to be an inquiry, more a tribute to the living legacy he’s created and how it still keeps City’s rivals awake at nights. But there is an irony in a protegee like Morgan Rogers scoring a Champions League hat-trick on the very night that Pep was watching his team toil for goals against Bruges. There was something touching about his smiling post-match conversation with Cole Palmer last weekend…like former partners thrown back together at a wedding reception and wondering if they could have made more of a go of it.
Pep says City will be different in a couple of weeks when he gets his injured players back. Of his seasoned winners, he’s currently missing only Ruben Dias, Nathan Ake and Rodri (who looks more like a worthy Balon D’Or winner with every passing week). You can throw Jeremy Doku and maybe Oscar Bobb into the mix plus the January impulse buys. Bournemouth have got more injuries than City.
Age is not an injury. Managing a senescent squad with players that can only give you 70 minutes once a week is just managing. Pep prefers to manage a lean squad but City’s recent recruitment policy – in and out – has not made the most of their market position. It wasn’t a lack of skill or will that caught up with Djokovic in the semi-final, Tiger will never fail for lack of trying or talent. We each have our time, that’s all. Time seems to be catching up with this City squad.
Pep knows a million times more about football than I ever will but I just can’t see the depth or durability in his dressing-room to weather a month in the company of Arsenal, Newcastle, Liverpool and whoever UEFA throw onto their February fixture list. Oh, and then there’s the ritual of a trip to Tottenham at the end of the month! That’s one long corner to try to turn when energy is an issue.
And yet driving away from the Bruges game, I listened to the venerable voice of 5Live’s John Murray musing that it would be just like City to go on from here and win the greatest prize in club football again. I can’t see it myself but I can see why John and other astute judges are prepared to put rhyme and reason to one side and sense there is something in the air, a twist or two of fate ready to propel Guardiola back to Munich and the final and the ultimate triumph he couldn’t quite deliver to Bayern.
It’s that movie scene where the monstrous killer that has terrorised the neighbourhood is finally cornered and shot several times, only to reach out from the reservoir of blood in which he lies stricken to grab the heroine’s ankle and fight on. Real Madrid and Bayern thought that City had been written out of the story but now they are coming after one of them again.
And because Guardiola’s reputation goes before him – and maybe only because of that – my assertion that City will not win the Champions League is made with a big, big ‘but’…it would be fun being wrong.
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