Gaël Clichy has highlighted Pep Guardiola’s intense drive for perfection by revealing the Manchester City head coach has banned pizza and will not allow any player to train if overweight.
The left-back says Guardiola has already excluded some of his squad, with those players thought to be on individual conditioning programmes, and has impressed Clichy, particularly with his attention to detail.
“On the field, outside the field, every detail counts,” Clichy said. “For example, you often hear managers say being healthy is really important. With him, if your weight is too high, you’re not training with the team. That is the first thing and you can hear it a lot, but for my part it’s the first time any manager has really done it. So we have a few players who are not training with the team yet.”
Guardiola has been clear about the squad’s diet. “He cut out some juice and pizza and all the heavy food is not allowed,” said the 31-year-old. “Some people think: ‘That’s normal, it should be like this.’ But in truth it’s not always like this and I know because I’ve been playing football for a long time. It’s really refreshing and very exciting.”
Clichy believes that Guardiola is a coach who can help footballers of all positions. The former Barcelona and Bayern Munich coach wants his goalkeeper to be an accomplished ball player, which means Joe Hart’s position as the No1 may come under threat.
Clichy said: “He’s an ideal manager for any kind of player. The goalkeeper needs to be better with their feet, the centre-backs are improving, the full-backs are important, the centre midfield – he said something like if he could play 11 midfielders, he would play them, so I guess for a midfielder it’s unbelievable. And the strikers are going to score a lot of goals because we are going to create a lot of chances. I can even tell you that the assistant manager will improve so he’s the kind of guy that, if you’re lucky to work with him during your career, he is someone you will remember for a long time because he’s truly impressive.”
Clichy previously worked under Arsène Wenger at Arsenal and says Guardiola has revolutionised the game, as the Frenchman did when he came to English football in 1996. “I’ve been lucky because I’ve trained only a few weeks with Guardiola and I was eight years with Wenger,” he said. “There are a lot of similarities between the two but also so much difference. In eight or nine years, Guardiola has won pretty much everything and he’s changed the way we see football.
“He was probably one of the first to bring the full-backs really high, to put a midfield player as a centre-back. It’s a step forward. Wenger, years ago, brought something back from wherever he was [France and Japan] into English football and kind of changed the way people see football. I guess the two of them are just great managers but you could say the same for Ferguson and Mourinho.
“Every manager has their own philosophy and for sure he’s coming with his own ideas and it’s quite refreshing for us.”
Guardiola was announced as Manuel Pellegrini’s successor on 1 February and Clichy agrees with his former manager, who stated at the end of last season that this was a distraction for the players.
“It’s normal,” Clichy said. “For example, if you’re working and in two weeks you’re going to Hawaii for a month’s holiday or a honeymoon, you will have to think about this. Even if you know the present moment is important, you cannot just block this. You should be able to block it but you’re in Manchester, it’s raining and you know in two weeks you’ll be in Hawaii on the beach so you have to think about things like that. Probably [Pellegrini] was right when he said that.”
It was not deliberate. “No, we went to the semi-final of the Champions League with luck, of course, because you need luck in life,” Clichy added. “We would not have got the semi-finals if we were not working hard. But after what happened, it happens. We had a poor season in the Premier League. We had a good year in the Champions League. Some people will say that it wasn’t good, some players dropped, some worked hard and other people will say the opposite. That’s the opinion of each other and that’s it.”
Guardiola, whose team face Borussia Dortmund in Shenzhen on Thursday in the first match of their China tour after Monday’s game against Manchester United was called off, has impressed with his honesty. Clichy said: “He told us: ‘We are going to be friends for all pre-season and I know that when I have the XI for Sunderland some players are going to be upset and from that moment I don’t know what to expect.’ He wants us to trust him and it’s the right way to start a relationship.”
