Jurgen Klinsmann and Tottenham predicted Pep Guardiola revolution amid brutal Man City thrashing

We all have a Pep Guardiola teamsheet that has provoked a particularly eyebrow-raising reaction, but his first Manchester City Premier League game against Sunderland in 2016 still stands out.

Aside from the fact that Aleksandar Kolarov was starting at centre-back, Guardiola had gone for Kevin De Bruyne and David Silva in midfield, and a front three.

The conventional wisdom was that you couldn’t do that in the Premier League, where variations on 4-2-3-1 had held sway for the previous decade. Fernandinho would be overwhelmed as the lone holding midfielder.

Of course, we now know Guardiola made this the new normal, certainly as far as City are concerned. If anything, it can look even more attacking now, with the two number eights frequently joining the front three to form a packed forward line.

More than two decades before Guardiola arrived, a talent-stacked front five also lined up in a Manchester City home game to the grumblings of conventional wisdom. It proved to be something of an outlier but also produced one of the most memorable games of the late Maine Road era.

The 1994 World Cup in the United States fuelled the Premier League’s first significant influx of prime overseas talent and Tottenham chairman Alan Sugar could not get enough of telling star names “you’re hired”.

Romania were a surprise package of the tournament, knocking out Argentina en route to the quarter-finals and two of their standouts - Ilie Dumitrescu and Gheorghe Popescu - arrived at White Hart Lane alongside Germany superstar Jurgen Klinsmann.

Popescu, a classy deep-lying playmaker, was handed what looked like a pretty thankless task by manager Ossie Ardiles as the sole specialist midfielder behind a fantasy football forward line of