Guardiola a great at City but needs Champions League for immortality

“No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history” – William Hazlitt.

For Pep Guardiola the question is: does he need to overcome a so-far fatal flaw of overthinking selection and win the Champions League for Manchester City in order to be ranked in the all-time managerial pantheon? Or does a CV that already includes two Champions League titles with Barcelona and three Premier League titles and a domestic treble for City make a nonsense of the debate?

This is the fascination as his team roll through another Champions League campaign which, if it ends in triumph, will surely finally silence his naysayers. City’s 5-0 obliteration of Sporting on Tuesday was the latest evidence of the ruthless winning machine Guardiola has built. He is assured of a place in the Premier League managers’ hall of fame, but the doubters put an asterisk next to the Barcelona Champions League wins because he was able to select Lionel Messi.

The thinking is that if you take away arguably the best footballer of all time then Guardiola is a manager with a self-defeating inability to stop tinkering when it truly counts, a flaw that proved costly in May’s Champions League final defeat by Chelsea. Then, Guardiola’s XI became a collector’s item for not including his first-choice holding midfielder, Rodri, or Fernandinho. The exclusion of João Cancelo, his playmaking full-back, was a puzzle too.

Another selection oddity came when he dropped his kingpin creative force Kevin De Bruyne for the Champions League quarter-final first leg at Tottenham in 2019. End result: no away goal – the method by which City were eliminated after a 4-4 aggregate draw.

Has he learned from these selection faux pas? That is the