Finding another top-tier job should be no problem for City’s outgoing manager whose legacy may even cause his successor a degree of unexpected discomfort
Tuesday was a night of firsts at the Etihad Stadium. Manchester City reached the semi-finals of the Champions League. Zlatan Ibrahimovic failed to have any tangible effect on a late-stage Champions League knockout match (actually, scratch that one). And right at the end, despite maintaining his familiar press conference attitude of a deeply gloomy mountain moose, Manuel Pellegrini made a joke. An actual joke, complete with real laughing.
Despite his excellent manners, Pellegrini has never really liked speaking to the English press, with good reason given he appears to be a relatively normal human being. This is unlikely to change in the remaining nine games (maximum) of his City career. Still, Pellegrini could not resist a laugh when he was asked if it would be “interesting” if City were drawn to face Bayern Munich and Pep Guardiola. “Interesting? For me?” Pellegrini dead-panned, before breaking into a large and slightly frightening grin, no doubt considering with genuine horror the kind of soap opera such a draw would entail.
Pellegrini can afford to smile, however. One league title, this season’s second, farewell Capital One Cup and now a first ever semi in the big league: this is a pretty decent legacy whatever happens from here. Finding another top-tier job should be no problem, although he refused to budge an inch on this when pressed. More intriguingly, City’s progress, slightly against the head, raises the prospect of a degree of unexpected discomfort for Guardiola when he takes over in the summer.
Reports of the premature death of this pre-Pep team have, it seems, been exaggerated. Another step further in this competition and Guardiola could even be facing a milder version of the same pressure that faced him when he joined a Bayern team already enthroned as European champions by his unpretentious successor: what American political strategists might call The Jupp Pellegrini Possibility. No pressure then, Pep. You take over, rip it all up. We’ll just park the team over here. Next to Real Madrid and the others.
What happens now is doubly fascinating. For one thing City appear, against all expectation, to have a pop-up team emerging in between the breaking of the waves. A precarious midweek thing but a thing nonetheless. For years one of the chief bleats about City’s progress has been the fact the best players are still the same players. Kompany-Touré-Silva-Agüero has been the spine, with a revolving cast around the edges.
But this tie was won without any tangible input from any of them. The key players over two legs against PSG were instead Mangala-Otamendi-Fernando-Fernandinho-De Bruyne: the central defensive block of four, plus City’s outstanding creative player.
On paper it still looks a slightly make‑do-and-mend nucleus. Not to mention one that probably has no more than a month left to peak. But there is still something here, a victorious quarter-final XI without any real input from the original gang of four, and oddly perhaps the most purely Pellegrini-hallmarked spine of his three-year reign.
There are surely parts here to be salvaged, qualities unexpectedly revealed. The defence in particular is a fascinating subject. The stats indicate Eliaquim Mangala really might not be the problem his occasional moments of sweat-soaked panic would suggest.
Instead it is Pellegrini’s loyalty to Martín Demichelis that has perhaps been City’s undoing in the league. In matches where Demichelis has played 45 minutes or more, their record reads played 12, won three, lost seven. Without him they’ve played 20 and lost just two.
On points per game, had Demichelis played every league match City would be fourth from bottom of the league. Whereas judged solely on their points‑per‑game record without him, had either Mangala or a combination of any other central defensive player at the club played those games instead of Demichelis, City would now be level on 72 points with Leicester. Of course, the numbers only ever tell a little of the story, but those are still some fairly damning stats.
On a similarly basic level, City’s progress past PSG suggests there are, behind the ageing star parts, some playing assets that might just survive the expected cull. In defence it is almost impossible to see Guardiola wanting to keep that slightly wild Otamendi-Mangala partnership going. If only for stylistic reasons: Pep likes his multi-skilled distributors at the back.
But he also likes to jiggle and fine-tune and rework. Perhaps some kind of broader defensive partnership might be extracted from the ex-Porto triangle of Tuesday night. Fernando was excellent again, mobile and neat in his passing. He has played centre-back a fair bit at previous clubs. It isn’t hard to imagine a role in the defensive system, perhaps a little deeper, for a player who seems to improve the better his rival.
Elsewhere Kevin De Bruyne was the classiest attacker on show. Guardiola knows all about City’s record signing, having been on the end of a 4-1 Wolfsburg shellacking last year in which De Bruyne repeatedly cut through his team on the counterattack. He is beautifully precise in his movements, all laser-guided angles and peripheral vision. One pass inside Marquinhos was utter perfection, paced and timed and spun into David Silva’s path as though delivered on a pillow by some scurrying footman. Guardiola will need a fairly jaw-dropping plan B, some guaranteed world-beater, to choose not to build his new team around the Belgian.
Sergio Agüero will surely remain the chief attacking focus. Agüero had a scratchy night against PSG, with a horrible missed penalty, some whacks on the ankles and a twisted knee. Perhaps Guardiola might even look to get something else from his star forward. Agüero plays as a lone striker but is so much more too: a dribbler, a passer, a lovely mover. He might have had fewer impact injuries if he had had more company up there in the Premier League, or been asked to play a little deeper, to roam a little like David Villa or Lionel Messi at Barcelona.
Others will be surplus to requirement: the full-backs surely; Silva, Wilfried Bony, Jesús Navas perhaps. Separately, there is an entire spin-off mini-series in what Guardiola ends up making out of Raheem Sterling.
The summer always looked like a time of flux for City. A few more smiles from Pellegrini and it could yet be given added spice by the dead hand of a very popular departing manager and the emergence of that doomed but still oddly compelling midweek shadow team in the last two weeks.
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