No ‘stupid tactics’, just brilliance from Pep and Phil

Oh how we laughed at Pep Guardiola over-thinking his tactics in the Champions League, even ranking the scale of his daftness after he bristled at questions in a pre-match press conference, leaning into the criticism with talk of “stupid tactics” and ending his one-man stand-up show with the threat to play 12 players against Atletico Madrid.

The truth is that Manchester City could barely have enjoyed much more possession had they fielded 12, 13 or 14 players, with Atletico Madrid happy to indulge in their most extreme incarnation of Sufferball, barely leaving the safety of their own half and ending 90 minutes with a shot so weak that some statisticians generously recorded it as a cross. It was ambitionless asphyxiation and it was pure, undiluted Diego Simeone.

For what felt like hours but was actually just 68 minutes, City patiently passed the ball forwards, backwards, sideways and then eventually to somebody on the right who inevitably tried to fizz it into the box but largely found the hands of Jan Oblak. There was little joy to be found in this repetition, nor in the many fruitless penalty appeals that punctuated a lengthy game of striker-less attack v defence.

FAO whoever is in charge of naming tactics: this is the Knuckle Duster https://t.co/pU6KLsLPnD

— Nick Miller (@NickMiller79) April 5, 2022

It had taken 55 minutes for Manchester City to muster a shot on target and 64 minutes to create a chance that should have been converted. In between, Atletico Madrid had made a triple substitution that had made no difference to the pattern of the game, only to the fatigue in the legs.

On 68 minutes, Guardiola made his own triple substitution, not borne of over-thinking but simply of thinking that he needed to initiate change