It has taken 12 years, but Pep Guardiola returned this Saturday to lift the Champions League trophy, this time with Manchester City after the two he achieved with Barça. The final whistle at the Ataturk Olympic Stadium, which sealed the cityzen title against Inter, left the Santpedor coach with the feeling that “the job is done”.
“The feeling is that the job is done. Now we will go for the Club World Cup, the Super Cup, but the feeling is that we have nothing left to win,” the Catalan told the Movistar microphone, who in Istanbul became the first coach with two triplets, won this year with the skyblues and in 2009 with the blaugranas. “It’s been so long since the other Champions that I don’t remember what I felt,” added Guardiola, who had not been a European champion since 2011.
“Barça is Barça, but here they have treated me like a son”, he differentiated between the glory lived in the club of his life and the triumphs in Manchester, where he arrived in 2016. Guardiola won 14 of 19 possible titles with the blaugrana and both at Bayern later and at City in the last seven years, he has been hegemonic in the League, with 11 out of 14 possible titles.
“We have won so many leagues but it seemed that without this it made no sense. You realize that the other titles make all the sense”, he pointed out about the importance of the rest of the competitions won by City, in addition to remarking that chance influences the Champions League , “it’s a flip coin”.
“They could have tied us,” he pointed out about a match where Inter had chances to take the game to extra time. Despite this, Guardiola assured that the game went “more or less as expected”.
One of City’s keys was Rodrigo, scorer of the only goal of the game, who went from playing a “horrible” first half, according to the player himself, to deciding the game in the second half, partly due to a conversation at halftime with Guardiola. “I’ve learned from the past, I don’t fight at halftime in a Champions League final. I told him: ‘Relax. You’re the best midfielder in Europe. Don’t rush,'” the coach revealed in the conversation with his pupil.
Guardiola acknowledged that “in general” his team was not in the final “at the level” of the excellent season they have signed, perhaps because of the vertigo of winning the first Champions League in the history of City. “Probably next year if we go far we’ll be more relaxed,” said Guardiola, who ended his words with a joke to the king of Europe’s top competition: “Don’t let Madrid get too confident, we’re only 13 Champions League titles away from them.” .
