Thomas Tuchel meets old foe Pep Guardiola as Bayern face Man City in Champions League

Rival managers cross swords once more in quarter-final first leg at the Etihad Stadium

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola and then Chelsea manager Thomas Tuchel on the touchline during a Premier League clash in January, 2022. PA

Thomas Tuchel has urged Bayern Munich to be “smart, brave” and “at their best physically,” for the challenge of facing Manchester City at the Etihad.

The Bayern head coach has barely been in his new job for a fortnight, but if he is still feeling his way around what he called the “tactical solutions” available to him, he has every reason for confidence in second-guessing City’s game plan.

After all, Tuchel has devoted many hours to studying their manager Pep Guardiola and has a history of more than matching him in knockout competitions, the best of which brings them into collision this evening, as City and Bayern contest the first leg of a Champions League quarter-final.

Tuchel versus Guardiola: it has become a classic modern duel, a joust of like-minded innovators with a mutual respect and an intriguing backstory.

Tuchel, at 49 the younger man by three years, used to seek out Guardiola’s company when Guardiola was coaching Bayern, to learn from him.

Not much later they became rivals across in the heavyweight division of German football, when Tuchel took over at Borussia Dortmund.

Those games usually went Guardiola’s way. As fellow coaches in England, when Tuchel was at Chelsea, the tide turned a little. Part of what fascinates in tonight’s 11th head-to-head between the two managers are the echoes of the Champions League final two seasons ago.

Bayern Munich manager Thomas Tuchel watches a training session in Munich on April 10, 2023, on the eve of his side's Champions League quarter-final, first-leg clash against Manchester City. AP

Bayern Munich manager Thomas Tuchel leads training. AFP

Bayern's Sadio Mané trains for the Manchester City game. AP

Bayern's Sadio Mané, centre, trains with teammates. AP

Bayern Munich's Kingsley Coman warms up. AFP

Bayern Munich midfielder Leroy Sane attends training. AFP

Bayern Munich's Jamal Musiala and Ryan Gravenberch at training. AFP

Bayern Munich's French defender Benjamin Pavard warms up. AFP

Bayern Munich manager Thomas Tuchel arrives at training. AFP

Bayern Munich's Daley Blind trains with Sadio Mane. AFP

Then, as now, Tuchel had been sacked by one club earlier in the season and joined another to correct signs of a slump.

Recently departed from Paris Saint-Germain, he took over Chelsea in early 2021. Within four months, he had strung together three victories over Guardiola’s City, in an FA Cup semi-final, in the Premier League and, most significantly, by 1-0 in Porto to lift the European Cup.

“A tight game,” recalled Guardiola yesterday. “We reviewed it a month later and it wasn’t as bad as I thought. But I don’t live in the past.”

He described Tuchel as “a creative manager,” hinting he will be intrigued at the “shape they [Bayern] play”.

The Tuchel stamp on Bayern can only be faintly traced so far – in three games since replacing the sacked Julian Nagelsmann, he has beaten Dortmund to regain leadership of a tight Bundesliga title race, lost in the German Cup to Freiburg, and defeated Freiburg in the league – but there are some clear beneficiaries of his short reign so far.

Among them, Leroy Sane, who tonight returns to the club where he spent four seasons developing as a high-class winger before, unusually for a City player in the Guardiola era, leaving when City would have preferred him to stay.

Bayern Munich's Leroy Sane trains on April 10, 2023, on the eve of the Champions League quarter-final first leg against Manchester City. AFP

He was 24 when he moved to Munich, and Bayern were then the Champions League holders. If his aim was to establish himself as a more guaranteed pick in the starting XI than he felt he had been at City, he has not quite achieved it. But Tuchel has backed the winger to flourish.

“Leroy’s at an age [27], where the road ahead is unforgiving,” Tuchel said. “It’s up to him to make the most of that, and we’ll support him in it.”

Sane has played for all but a minute, operating from a position wide on the right, of Tuchel’s three games so far and he excelled in the 4-2 win over Dortmund. Of his last eight league or European matches under Nagelsmann, Sane had started four on the bench.

Guardiola warned of Bayern’s “very good attacking players, so creative, built to win”.

Tuchel has tactical options, although his preferred centre-forward, Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting, is out of the first leg with a knee problem. That may mean Thomas Muller pushing up into the middle of the front three, or the speed of Serge Gnabry being used in a central role.

Sadio Mane – signed from Liverpool last summer, but without a Bayern goal since October and absent through December and January with injury – is also in contention.

Mane has been City’s nemesis more times than Guardiola would care to remember. This time a year ago, he was scoring the equaliser for Liverpool at the Etihad to maintain the suspense in last season’s tussle for a Premier League title City edged by a point.

Six days later, Mane’s two Liverpool goals – his ninth and tenth in his 19 career meetings with City – were knocking Guardiola’s men out of an FA Cup semi-final.

“We have to be perfect to get a good result to take to Germany,” said Guardiola. “Against an elite club like Bayern, you have to deserve it.”