Pep Guardiola and Manchester City’s love-hate-need Big Cup relationship

Triumph and disaster. That’s how Kipling described “life’s two impostors” in the most quoted line from If, his paean to equanimity. But sod him, because a) it says here he’s been cancelled and b) he died in 1936 and therefore knows the square root of bugger all about Big Cup. Goodbye triumph and disaster, hello “visionary genius and bald fraud”. Those are the impostors Pep Guardiola will be wrestling with in the next few weeks as he tries to finally win Big Cup with Manchester City, a journey (drink two fingers) that resumes against Bayern Munich at the Etihad tonight.

With each passing year they don’t win it, City’s love-hate-need relationship with Big Cup gets more intense, and more scrutinised. At his pre-match press conference, Guardiola appealed for nuance and maturity, which was akin to asking people to get to know one another first at a Bacchanalian festival. “We want to try to win Big Cup but it doesn’t mean we are going to win,” he said. “Yesterday, it was the Masters. How many majors did Jack Nicklaus play in his career? How many wins out of 164 tries? Eighteen wins. Wow. He loses more than he wins. That is sport. . Michael Jordan, the best athlete for me in basketball, won six NBA titles out of 14 years. What is important is to be here, compete well, do our best… no more than that. I live my profession that way. After that if I lose, I lose. I’m not perfect.”

This is Guardiola’s seventh try with City, and his 11th since he won his second Big Cup with Barcelona in 2011. At times he has thought himself out of contention, so it’ll be interesting to see whether he tinkers tonight, as in the 2021 final against Chelsea, when he put an ingeniously subtle spin on the concept of subconscious self-loathing by picking a