Pep Guardiola, the head coach of Bayern Munich, always knew the bar was set high when he took his second job in senior management.
Bayern were on their way to a trophy treble when the former Barcelona manager agreed to take over. When he moved into his office at the club’s Sabener Strasse headquarters, the Uefa Champions League, the German Bundesliga and the German Cup for the previous season had just taken up residence in the trophy room.
His challenge was to better that and his employers added two young stars, Mario Gotze and Thiago Alcantara, to the squad to help him.
Guardiola duly added the European Super Cup and the Club World Cup, as well as a league title defence achieved at record speed.
His Bayern have compiled some statistical monuments, too, in terms of accuracy of passing and dominance of possession. But for all that, a heavy judgment on the success, or otherwise, of his first year in Germany, hangs on 90 minutes, or perhaps 120, in Munich on Tuesday night.
Bayern are unlikely to match, by the end of their Champions League semi-final against Real Madrid, the seven-goal aggregate margin by which they blitzed Barcelona under Guardiola’s predecessor, Jupp Heynckes, 12 months ago.
But, should they fail to overturn Madrid’s 1-0 advantage, then the comparison between Heynckes’s last campaign and Guardiola’s first, will be forensically audited by Bayern’s bosses, by the German media and by Bayern supporters, who winger Arjen Robben on Monday urged, via the pages of Bild-Zeitung, to “turn our stadium into an inferno”.
Criticism of Bayern’s display in the first leg centred on their being a little too cool, passing sweetly, as is their trademark, but penetrating seldom, the tempo of their football insufficiently urgent.
“I value possession and that’s what Bayern bought me here for,” Guardiola said. “In Germany, people like football played on the counter. I have to find a balance between my ideas and the culture in Germany.”
He has to find the way, he also acknowledged, to rev up Franck Ribery, the French winger. Ribery finished third in voting for the 2013 Ballon d’Or, behind only Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi; in other words he was deemed the standout player for Bayern’s all-sweeping collective under Heynckes.
Under Guardiola, his form has dipped in recent weeks, although his goal in the win over Werder Bremen on Saturday, his first in seven matches, may have perked him up.
Ribery’s relative slump is “the coach’s problem”, Guardiola said. “Every day I think about what I can do to support Franck. He’s an outstanding player, always wanting to help the team.”
The 5-2 league win over Bremen recovered some of the vigour that has defined Bayern over the past two years and gave a retort to suspicions that, by winning the Bundesliga so early – in March – Bayern had allowed themselves to let momentum slip because their weekend fixtures have become academic exercises.
Unbeaten on the way to seizing the domestic title, they have won only two of the five subsequent league fixtures. Given that they could only draw 1-1 with Manchester United in the first leg of their Champions League quarter-final, and lost at Madrid, the fear was that recovering urgency for the matches that matter had become harder.
Guardiola is also accused of making excessive alterations to the starting XI and switches to starting positions of some players, notably captain Phillip Lahm, who has alternated between full-back and central midfield.
In his first 50 matches, Guardiola made 173 changes to his starting XIs, an average of more than three per game. With so much tinkering, the sceptics wonder, should there not be more a distinct Plan B, or C, if the elegant Plan A based around elaborate pass-and-move is not producing the right outcomes?
Heynckes’s Bayern could certainly appear more direct, less wedded to the principle of possession, than Guardiola’s. Should Bayern fall short on Tuesday night, the Heynckes approach will be bathed in a flattering light.
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