In trying to avoid fate, did Pep make it more likely?
It was another eyebrow-raising call from Pep Guardiola. Perhaps that was the appropriate way to end the night given the self-defeating way he had started it. In his post-match press conference, the Manchester City manager was asked when exactly he told his players about the 3-5-2 formation they set out against Lyon on Saturday night.
Guardiola did not reveal that, but did say the following: "In this competition, tactics are not the most important thing."
That is a convenient comment for a manager whose perplexing formation and line-up seemed to level the gap between a squad worth over £900m, his, and one worth around a third of that.
Guardiola, for some reason, decided to play five defenders against a side that had got 40 points from 28 games in Ligue 1, while leaving out four of his most creative players. That seemed very important given it took away so many of City's attacking strengths, while only serving to make them more defensively vulnerable.
On the other side, there was the impressive focus of Rudi Garcia's approach, which ultimately tilted the game in Lyon's favour. They did a number on City, taking advantage of the flaws we have seen time and again. Tactics were certainly important to Lyon and they stuck with what they knew best.
"With Pep, you can expect anything. We knew Pep could concoct something to cause us problems. But in the end I think we won the tactical battle in the sense that we've mastered our tactical system, even if I changed it [during the match]," Garcia said after.
Perhaps Guardiola was thinking of the team that has dominated Europe for the past decade, and how Zinedine Zidane drew match-winning performances out of Real Madrid without doing anything special in terms of tactical ideology. Maybe he meant that mental character is the most important.
One significant difference is that the Frenchman had a lot of hardened senior players. City do not. They have a squad that look absolutely brilliant when everything is on song, but don't seem to know how to react when it goes wrong. And it now goes wrong every single season in the Champions League, and always before the semifinals.
Kevin De Bruyne's comments after the game made it all the more conspicuous. In a post-match interview that went down a few tangents, and had a few spiky comments, the Belgian still summed it up. "It feels like the same old story for me, to be honest."
It certainly had all the same details. There were bad misses, bad decisions, questionable calls and a below-par performance. There was chaos. But all of that seemed to stem from the manager's needless adjustments, which resulted in yet another early exit.
There is almost a Greek tragedy element to it. In trying to avoid the fate he fears most, he just makes it more likely. Tactics actually become by far the most important thing in that regard.
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