Let’s have some fun: Manchester City’s Rodrigo (right) and Ruben Dias toy around with the Premier League trophy after the 1-0 win over Chelsea at the Etihad on Sunday. — AP
MANCHESTER City had been in possession of the ball for a minute, but to the denizens of the Bernabeu, it felt like an hour or more.
Pep Guardiola’s team moved it backward and forward and then backward again. They switched it from side to side, sometimes via the scenic route, stopping off to admire the view from midfield, and sometimes taking the express.
Real Madrid’s players did not seem especially concerned. They would have known as they prepared for their Champions League semi-final that there would be phases when there was little they could do beyond watch City move the ball around.
The danger, in those moments, is allowing your concentration to flicker, just for a moment, to be mesmerised by the swirling patterns.
The crowd did not like it one bit.
The modern Real might be a dichotomy of convenience — simultaneously seeing themselves as the game’s greatest statesman and nothing but a scrappy underdog — but there are some boundaries their fans are not willing to cross.
The idea that a visitor should come to the Bernabeu and look as comfortable as City did, in that spell, was clearly one of them.
Real class: Kevin De Bruyne is hugged by teammates after scoring against Real Madrid in their first leg Champions League semi-final at the Bernabeu. City dominated despite drawing 1-1 and went on to win the second leg 4-0. — Reuters
Guardiola’s team looked so thoroughly at home that they might as well have had their feet on the coffee table and a wash in the machine.
The crowd started first to whistle, and then to jeer. Boos washed down the stands, designed to encourage Real’s players to break out of their defensive phalanx, to reassert their primordial right to dominance.
It was hard not to be struck by the oddness of the scene. The idea that English teams arrive at Europe’s great citadels with a technical deficit is horribly outdated.
The idea that English football lacks refinement compared to its continental cousins is, at the elite level, such an anachronism that younger readers might struggle to believe it ever existed.
The Premier League’s emissaries have conquered all the most revered territory in Europe over the last couple of decades. It was as long ago as 2006 that Arsenal became the first English team to win at the Bernabeu.
A couple of years later, Arsene Wenger’s team did the same thing to AC Milan at San Siro. Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and City themselves have all won at the Nou Camp or the Allianz Arena or one of the European game’s other sacred spaces.
Some of these victories have been rooted in defensive obduracy and surgical precision in attack. Sometimes, they have been won by greater physicality, higher intensity — England’s traditional virtues repurposed as weapons. One or two of them might have been a little bit lucky.
Increasingly, though, they win by inflicting on Europe’s great and good the sort of treatment that England’s teams had to endure for so long. They have, with mounting frequency, displayed a level of tactical sophistication and technical deftness their opponents cannot match.
City’s display in Madrid did not lead to a victory — they only swept Real aside at home a week later — but the scale of their superiority was noteworthy.
In part, that could be traced to the individual excellence of Guardiola’s players. The coach, too, deserves credit for the work he has done in shaping and moulding this team. City’s real advantage, though, was in the novelty of their ideas.
There should be nothing controversial about the suggestion that the Premier League, in its current incarnation, is not identifiably English, not in any real sense.
The colours are the same, of course. Something about the atmosphere, too, is native, idiosyncratic, even if it is all a little quieter these days. Perhaps it is possible to discern a little Englishness in the tempo of the game, in how crowds celebrate corners, in the ongoing appreciation for a thundering tackle.
But for the most part, what the Premier League sells is imported. The players, of course, and more and more of the coaches, too, but everything else as well.
The training methods, the organisational structures, the playing philosophies, the strategies, the tactics: All of them have been sourced elsewhere and added to the mixture.
That is not a criticism. It is the Premier League’s openness — both to ideas as well as to investment — that has helped transform a backwater league into the most engaging domestic competition on the planet.
The transformation in England’s football culture, once so insular, is something to be admired.
While the Premier League has long been a crucible, it has rarely been a laboratory.
The teams’ play now is, of course, substantially more complex than it was 20 years ago. There are wing backs and false nines, low blocks and high presses, inverted wingers and sweeper-keepers.
Every trend has washed up on English shores eventually (sometimes a little reluctantly).
It is a showcase of football contemporary thought.
All of the innovations that have changed English football have been developed elsewhere, in the start-up cultures of Europe: from Wenger’s decree that perhaps athletes should not drink the whole time all the way to the high press preached by Juergen Klopp, Mauricio Pochettino and Marcelo Bielsa.
It is then entirely possible that Guardiola has done something unique this season. He had already pioneered the idea that a fullback might actually be a wing (at Barcelona) or an ancillary midfielder (at Bayern Munich). Now, though, he has gone one step further, and introduced the concept that perhaps a central defender does not need to be held back by a label.
At the Bernabeu, it was the presence of John Stones — both a defender and a midfielder — that allowed City to exert such control.
It was the numerical advantage he gave Guardiola’s team in the centre of the field that meant Real had to be so passive that they risked the wrath of their home crowd.
Nothing in football is ever truly new, of course.
All of these positional switches are — as journalist, historian and Ted Lasso product-placement expert Jonathan Wilson has noted — simply the game reverting to the formation known as the W-M, played as orthodoxy in the 1930s.
Many of them have fluttered around elsewhere, too, occasionally popping up in the least likely of places.
Anyone hailing Guardiola’s imagination might be pointed to Chris Wilder’s Sheffield United, for example — a team that regularly allowed their defenders to moonlight as midfielders without any risk at all of being presented as football’s cutting edge.
That Guardiola has done it, though, matters. It gives the concept his seal of approval and turns it into best practice.
Where he treads, others will follow. For once, the Premier League will not find itself adopting the ideas of others, perfecting and reflecting them to be admired, but with a contribution of its own that it can send out into the world, something that will forever be a little slice of England. — NYT
