From Poet : compare & contrast
A couple interesting emails you’ve posted.
When I saw the headline “contrasting Wenger & Mourinho” I was expecting something a little different. I thought it was the contrast between Wenger’s unwillingness to blame Ospina for his poor performance (to be fair, the whole team was weak defensively) and Mourinho throwing his players under the bus (namely, Matic)
RE: Guardiola
Brendan, like many, likes Guardiola. You yourself said he’s the most demanding coach in Europe.
One of the things he does is he pays great attention to details.
Last month I was talking to one of the professors at MIT Media Lab. They had Guardiola over at the lab during his gap year (he was living in New York, which isn’t far from Boston.) One of the students asked Guardiola if he’d like a chance to manage a team of robots, if MIT was able to build them.
Guardiola said, “No. The difficult part of football management is not coming up with a game plan. It is getting the players to fully understand the game plan, so they can execute it. With robots, the challenge is gone.”
I can only imagine how demanding Guardiola was, and how much details he went through with his players, to get his Barcelona side to press in such organized manner. Everyone from the tiny Xavi to the ultra-athlete Alves were doing their job, pressing as a unit.
Moving on to Bayern:
In his biography Pep Confidential it was recorded how Pep taught Jerome Boateng to defend.
“Guardiola discovered Boateng is totally self-taught,” writes Perarnau. “The young German defender has been explaining that no one has ever shown him how to defend. In fact, Boateng confesses that he didn’t even know that the defensive line could be organized. He thought that every player defended instinctively.
“Guardiola is enchanted by Boateng’s wide-eyed innocence on this point, and realizes that he has a pearl on his hands. This is someone with an enormous amount of potential as well as a clear willingness to learn.”
So apparently defensive coaching is not universal like I thought. Wenger is not special in that case. Jerome wasn’t taught how to defend during his time at Man City either, and that’s why he was seen as a weak defender.
It was Guardiola’s attention to detail and determination to have his players play exactly as he envision that allowed him to spot Boateng’s shortcomings and improve him into one of Bundesliga’s top defenders.
Contrast that with Wenger. Who for years failed to teach mis-positioning out of Vermaelen. Who couldn’t teach Denilson how to track a run.
Contrast that again with all the wonderful attacking talent Wenger has developed. The list is too long to write down.
It’s good that we’ve at least been able to buy good defenders like Gilberto and Sagna because Wenger can’t develop them. Instead, he’s developed some amazing attacking talent.
It is no coincidence that all of his most expensive teenagers are all attackers, such as Ox, Walcott, and Ramsey.
Myles says:
Having met the Invisible Wall, he’s a very nice guy, a beautiful Brazilian character with a lot of heart.
And Gilberto is the most under-rated footballer of the last 20 years.
Sagna was the most natural defender at Arsenal.
Wenger was correct to tell us he could do a job at centreback, which many doubted.
I doubted it until I saw Sagna play centreback once.