It was not difficult to detect the prickliness in Kevin De Bruyne. Was Lionel Messi from another planet, the Manchester City forward was asked. “No, otherwise he wouldn’t be here,” De Bruyne shot back.
It had been another Messi masterclass; another night to emboss the theory that no matter what opposing teams try it can never be enough to suppress this force of nature. And, goodness knows, City tried – with a multilayered plan. They departed Barcelona on Wednesday having endured a 4-0 Champions League defeat. Messi scored the 37th hat-trick of his career.
De Bruyne feared what was coming. “We know what people are going to say – that we were bad,” he said. There was a broader context to the result. For the second big game in succession, City had come up short. At the beginning of the month, they had been outhustled in the Premier League at Tottenham Hotspur to lose 2-0. Now this.
Throw in the helter-skelter 3-3 Champions League draw at Celtic and the unlucky 1-1 draw at home to Everton in the league and it adds up to four matches without a win. It is the sort of run that would be the prompt for purple faces at some clubs and the gnashing of teeth among supporters.
The material for the prosecution of Pep Guardiola was there. Claudio Bravo’s ludicrous sending-off in the 53rd minute for a deliberate handball, after he had left his penalty area and given the ball away to Luis Suárez, was the consequence of the City manager’s obsession with playing out from the very back. Bravo’s error was, in part, Guardiola’s error.
And what of the decision to use Sergio Agüero only as a 79th-minute substitute? Surely, Guardiola – the tactical sophisticate – had to find a way of getting the striker into whatever system he devised. When De Bruyne crossed early in the second half and there was no one there, everybody thought of Agüero. As an aside, what did Guardiola’s dropping of Agüero for the most glamorous fixture of the season say about the level of trust he has in him?
Then again, this was no open and shut case. City were in contention until Bravo’s dismissal; they trailed by one goal – and this was without Agüero. No one could say any of the front six had played poorly at that stage, although Fernandinho wanted a hole to open up after his slip had ushered in Messi for the goal. The goalkeeper’s red card disfigured the match.
City had pressed high. They squeezed Barcelona, who had difficulty bringing the ball out from the back. Messi, Suárez and Neymar did not see too much of it until after City had been reduced to 10 men. Listen to how the Barcelona players saw things. “The score was big but I don’t think the game was easy, at all,” Andrés Iniesta said. “It was a very difficult game,” Marc‑André ter Stegen said. “Four goals was too much.”
De Bruyne was defiant. “If you lose 4-0, it’s bad but the way we want to play is the good way,” he said. “At the start of the second half, it was for us. The red card makes it more difficult but even with 10 men we tried to create chances, so you cannot say anything about the mentality. I don’t think we have to change as a team or change the mentality. We won, already, a lot of games and it’s not like Barcelona is a bad team. We know people are going to say it’s bad but I see it differently. This is the way we need to play and we will win a lot of games like this.”
Guardiola has won a lot of games like this. He has long been a taker of calculated risks and he would argue that for every mistake by one of his goalkeepers on the ball, his teams have benefited far more from being able to build from deep – often, having lured in their opponents.
The risk at the Camp Nou was the tactic of pressing high left Guardiola’s defenders one-on-one against Messi, Suárez and Neymar – but it was working. And some sort of risk is essential against a team as good as Barcelona. Moreover, for periods before Bravo’s dismissal, City played with discipline and personality. They created chances and, that most precious of commodities, hope.
The problem was they were not clinical and, as usual, Barcelona were. It was interesting, too, to hear the view of the Barça midfielder Ivan Rakitic. “Barcelona can break up their tactics a bit more – it’s not all short; we can go long to the front three, as well,” he said. “If City push the line up and play one versus one at the back, you have to look for that space beyond. They can’t occupy the whole pitch. With the quality that we have up front, we have to look for it.”
Guardiola was asked whether the defeat had been the worst of his career. He said his Bayern Munich team’s 4-0 home defeat against Real Madrid in the second leg of the 2014 Champions League semi-final had been the low point, “because I didn’t make the correct decisions”. The inference was he was not consumed by too many regrets after this 4-0 defeat.
De Bruyne said: “Why can’t we beat Barcelona at home in the next game? People are going to say we’re never going to win but I don’t care what people say. We’ll just do the same and I’m sure we’ll be ready.”
