The impressive start of Guardiola

British newspaper The Guardian had last week an interesting view on Barcelona's start of the new season.





'Pep Team' win hearts, minds and games around Spain

Josep Guardiola has guided the same Barcelona players that finished 18 points off the pace last year to the top of La Liga this time around

Sid Lowe - The Guardian

There's plenty to see through the windows of La Masia, the Catalan farmhouse that stands proudly alongside the Camp Nou, dwarfed by the city that's grown around it - home to future generations of players, a kind of footballing indoctrination centre in all things Barça that's housed 493 players. Caught between life and death, there's the maternity hospital on one side and the crematorium on the other. Then there's the stadium itself; the tiny, soon-to-be abandoned training pitch in the shadow of its concrete stands, eye-holes ripped from the screens protecting players' intimacy; and the assorted streetlife gathering as night falls, not so much protecting its intimacy as selling it - from women to men to both.

But while David Beckham recalls a trip to La Masia spent watching the "other lads" hanging out the windows whistling at prostitutes, Andres Iniesta only had eyes for one man: Josep Guardiola i Sala. When Iniesta was a little lad plucked from the tiny town of Fuentealbilla, he plastered Pep Guardiola's picture all over the walls by his Masia bunk bed. And who could blame him?

After all, Guardiola won six leagues, a European Cup and an Olympic gold. He claimed he would have been a Third Division player if it hadn't been for Johan Cruyff but became the focal point of the emblematic, mould-breaking Dream Team that racked up four successive league titles; the metronome that kept them ticking over, constantly moving the ball on with a single touch; the man Atlético Madrid striker Kiko described in a word: "pam". "Pam-pam-pam-pam-pam-pam-pam-pam". No wonder Iniesta Blu-Tack'd him up. Born in Santpedor, schooled 100 metres from Camp Nou, a former ball-boy and La Masia resident, intelligent and engaging, a charismatic and eloquent defender of a Catalan and footballing identity, club captain and a model whose legacy survives in players like Xavi, Iniesta, and Cesc, Pep couldn't have been more of a hero.

Only he could and now, suddenly, he is. Because although he's the youngest coach in primera, much as he's losing his hair and losing weight - his staff complain that he rarely stops to eat from the tupperware tubs he takes in every day - Guardiola has proven that not only was he a unique player, he's an impressive coach. Suddenly the Catalan press that complained at losing José Mourinho is falling over itself to proclaim the "Pep Team" - "Pep's Dream Boys" was that little bit too ridiculous, even for them - the greatest thing in the whole wide world ever. Even the Madrid press is impressed, Marca's Miguel Serrano declaring: "If I was a kid now, my dad would have a hell of a job stopping me supporting Barcelona. The Pep Team's too late because you can change house, job, wife, political party and even your sex, but not your football team, yet when they play it's glorious."

Guardiola's done it with a commitment to Barcelona's ball-playing style and emotional roots: in one match in October, eight of their starting XI were youth team products and still they won. Which is what they do most weeks. In fact, it's what they've now done every week for seven weeks, hitting six past Sporting, five past Atlético and Almería and four more past Málaga this weekend, racking up 28 in nine league games - on course for the 107 set by John Toshack's Real Madrid in 1989-90. For some, this latest success was the best. A 4-1 victory against the odds on a surface more swimming pool than perfect pitch - even after four blokes attacked it with giant hairdryers. The kind of surface that, Captain Caveman Carles Puyol and hyperactive child Dani Alves apart, shouldn't have suited them. A 4-1 victory against a side that had won four on the trot, secured with spirit and practicality and even Guardiola admitting, "I told the players to hoof it." One that had every single bloody paper "Singing in the Rain", likening Xavi to Gene Kelly and, oddly, Fred Astaire; one, more importantly, that had them declaring: "it's games like this that win leagues".

Especially when they coincide with Valencia and Sevilla losing and Madrid rounding off a disastrous week in which Ramón Calderón fended off allegations of corruption and the team couldn't fend off a Second Division B side, by drawing 1-1 at Almería. Because those results carried Barcelona top for the first time since May 2007 when they took the first of two easy steps to blow the title.

"The secret," says Guardiola, "is that Barcelona have fantastic players." "The secret," counters one insider, "is that Barça have two things they didn't have last season: hunger and a coach." After all, the vast majority of Barcelona's players were there last year too, and they finished third - 18 points behind Madrid and utterly humiliated. There was no professionalism, no work, no togetherness; now, at last, there is. The complacency has gone, with Guardiola bringing huge energy. Last season, as he guided Barcelona B to the Second Division B title in his debut season as a coach, he believed that, such was the talent, just getting the first team going again would be enough.

Yet while Guardiola has changed Barcelona's attitude, got them pressing higher up the pitch, he has done more - much more - than that. "Those who said he had no experience are idiots," says one of his contemporaries, "Pep was a coach when he was a player. Experience isn't things happening to you, it's learning from them, seeking solutions." Intensely inquisitive, Guardiola was always learning - from pioneers like Cruyff and Lillo, from his spells in Qatar, Italy and Mexico. Now his players are learning from him. Obsessed with anticipating problems, his analysis of opponents is as exhaustive as it is exact, his findings presented to players in bite-sized chunks. His training sessions, worked through with those close to him and carried out behind closed doors, are to the point. "He remembers everything," says Xavi. "And everything is done for a reason, never just for the sake of it."

He is, says one of his closest collaborators, "hugely seductive". He's won over his players, got them running again. Well, some of them: he's had to tell Yaya Touré not to run so much. Busting your guts can be a red herring. The key to football, Guardiola insists, is positioning. And right now Barcelona's positioning couldn't be any better: back on top, 18 long months later.