Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola doesn’t strike you as the kind of bloke that spends his time playing video games or watching slasher movies.
The Manchester City manager famously spent his sabbatical year in New York, schmoozing with Russian chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov and world-renowned Catalan chef Ferran Adria.
You’d be surprised if Guardiola has spent a great deal of time playing Resident Evil or watching Terminator 2 for the millionth time on ITV2.
The 51-year-old may not be a horror nerd, but if there’s one thing he does know it’s football. And he knows how the script goes with Real Madrid, football’s great unkillable monster.
As a Barcelona player, Guardiola faced Los Blancos 21 times. Next week’s clash at the Bernabeu with City will be the 21st time as a coach. He knows what it takes to kill them. But he also knows the price you pay if you fail to destroy them for good.
The opening 20 minutes of the first leg of City’s Champions League semi-final against Madrid looked like two teams playing different sports.
Guardiola’s men were playing 21st-century football. Ridiculously quick, ridiculously sophisticated, all in the image of their epoch-defining coach. The visitors couldn’t cope with the intensity and the interplay.
Real Madrid, in stark comparison, looked stone age. A side demonstrating all the flaws of Florentino Perez’s Galacticos policy. Eleven star individuals who didn’t look like they knew how to play as a team.
David Alaba is one of the most decorated defenders in the history of football but he looked like a ringer that Carlo Ancelotti had texted before kick-off to make up the numbers as he struggled to deal with Phil Foden, Gabriel Jesus and Riyad Mahrez buzzing around him as well as Kevin De Bruyne’s incision from midfield.
City deservedly went two goals up through De Bruyne and Gabriel Jesus. Time and again they cut through Madrid’s disorderly, frazzled-looking backline. They could have killed the tie right…
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