WHEN Jerry Maguire asserted from a cinema screen that we live in a cynical world he might well have been referring to the English football media and a sizable portion of the population at large.
Four years ago, Pep Guardiola was highly venerated in this country, considered by many to be an utter genius and by some distance the greatest coach of his generation. We were spellbound and frankly a little smitten.
That all changed however in February 2016, when the Catalan revealed he was heading to our shores, because it’s all well and good dominating leagues where the smaller teams roll over and get their bellies rubbed but this was the Premier League son. Here anyone can beat anyone and good luck at Burnley with your fancy, tiki-taka ways.
Guardiola’s transparent belief that he would be a success in England was weirdly taken as an insult and suddenly the knives were out before he even had chance to take a scalpel to his new team.
Guardiola or Fraudiola? pic.twitter.com/cIhw8WCBCe
— Goal (@goal) March 9, 2020
Bovril-breathed hacks with Moore’s tackle on Pele as their phone screensaver and Big Sam and ‘Arry on speed-dial scoffed at his insistence on playing out from the back while Guardiola’s disclosure that he didn’t practise tackling left them staring at their screensavers in sheer despair. By downplaying the physical side of the game this Johnny Foreigner may as well have defaced the back of a bank note because as we all know Britain was founded on industry, tea, and technically-limited midfielders leaving one on an opponent.
From being previously revered Pep was now viewed as a threat: to the values we value and most of all to a long-held delusion that the Premier League is somehow unique and special. Subsequently, the desire for him to fail was palpable.
Yet by any conceivable metric it can emphatically be said that Guardiola’s spell in Blighty has been triumphant. He has won eight trophies across four seasons. He has been as transformative and influential a figure as Wenger before him. He has made our beautiful game stunning.
You would expect then from a nation that prides itself on its sense of fair play that we might have revised our cynicism. Held our hands up and cast our insecurities aside. Instead, pathetically, resentment set in and we simply changed the boundaries.
Guardiola soon enough became a ‘chequebook manager’ and this despite leaving other clubs in the dust who have spent in the same stratosphere. His failure to win the Champions League meanwhile has seen him criminally demeaned as a ‘bald fraud’.
The grandmaster is not alone though in finding himself disgracefully disrespected for daring to make the ‘Best League in the World’ ™ look perfectly ordinary. In the same year of his arrival another global giant blessed us with his presence, a player formerly lionised to an extent where we all went a bit giddy at the knees at his breath-taking talent. Even the usually divisive Twitter used to be unified in love and lolz as it shared clips of his audacious goals and anecdotes from his best-selling book yet when Zlatan Ibrahimovic joined Manchester United at a stroke of a pen he became washed up and a spent force. He was never going to cut it, in the fierce environs of the Premier League: that was the common consensus.
After being suitably Zlatan against the likes of Alfie Mawson and Andrea Ranocchia for two years here’s what the Swede later had to say on the matter – “(The Premier League) gets a lot of attention, although I feel the quality is a little bit overrated – the individual quality, the technical part. They said I came in a wheelchair. All the people that talked, in the whole Premier League, I put them in a wheelchair.”
And now it seems it is Lionel Messi’s turn to be brought down a peg or two because even the greatest footballer to ever lace up a pair of boots is not immune from our strange concoction of complexes that means we must always neg the very best of our guests. As the prospect of the little maestro signing for Manchester City increases by the day – contentious contracts and clauses permitting – so too have our defensive mechanisms kicked in starting with Paul Merson who claimed this week that the Argentine was on a downward trajectory. For context, let’s recall what the spluttering sage had to say about Kevin De Bruyne’s transfer to City in 2015 – “I just don’t see this. I don’t see fifty-odd million for this player. I thought it was Lira.”
Lionel Messi vs Premier League clubs:
– Games: 15
– Goals: 16 ⚽️"Messi couldn't do it in the Premier League." pic.twitter.com/GB01n9MCoi
— Football Tweets (@FutballTweets) November 1, 2016
A higher brow hot take came courtesy of the Guardian who avowed that a Messi and Guardiola reunion would ‘not make City better’ while Tony Evans in the Independent was happy to cede the Barcelona legend is still the GOAT but worries how his arrival would hinder Phil Foden’s development.
For a good many seasons Lionel Messi has been a PlayStation player in an analogue world. He has amazed us consistently and regarding the intensity of the Premier League he has scored a goal every 90.6 minutes against English sides in the Champions League. Last term, despite being hampered by injury, he scored and assisted more than anyone in our top flight.
We should be thrilled to have him, ecstatic to be privileged enough to witness his incredible gifts at close range on a weekly basis. Instead we assume an all-too-familiar defensive stance and gripe.
Why is this? It could be said that our erroneous belief that we have the best league in the world brings out the very worst in us.
