As a basic rule, the best TV sitcoms tend to centre on a character stuck in their surroundings; and trapped, by extension, in their unfulfilled desires.
The office manager who wants to be a comedian but doesn’t realise he’s not funny. The ennui-ridden cafe owner who falls in love with a priest and can’t escape her family. Plus, of course, the genius-level football coach in the high fashion yak-weave hoodie who can’t stop trying to win the Champions League, but keeps electing an ultimately self-destructive inverted-diamond false wingback system in the key knockout game against Dinamo Plovdiv.
Yes: it’s almost that time again. April is the cruellest month when it comes to the unfulfilled career ambitions of the Champions League elite, and next week’s quarter-final draw will stir up memories of springtime traumas, gameplans hexed and all the rest. Not least for Pep Guardiola, for whom this summer marks a decade since his last Champions League final appearance, an unexpectedly vivid strand in his professional story.
Manchester City look a good bet to reach that April division bell again. They go into the last-16 second leg against Borussia Mönchengladbach 2-0 up from the away game. This is an exceptional team in a rare period of grace. After which, all being well, the familiar ordeal will present itself once again. That Champions League endgame already looks like the keynote of intrigue in City’s season from here, shadowed as ever by the sense of a man trapped in his own dramatic cycle.
The idea that Guardiola routinely “overthinks” these knockout ties, defeats self-inflicted by some overwrought tactical plan, has become widely accepted. Is it really the case? The counter argument is that Guardiola always tinkers with his team. We dwell on it only in defeat. But that tendency does seem to manifest with a greater venom on these occasions.
Trawl back through the doomed Bayern rejig against Real Madrid, the man-to-man defence against Barcelona that ended with Jérôme Boateng simply lying down on his back like a punctured lilo at Lionel Messi’s feet. Chuck in needless all-out attack away to Monaco, the doomed left-sided gambit against Liverpool, the mirroring of Lyon’s shape last summer (Why Pep, why? Why is Eric García in this equation?) and the answer does seem to be, yes. Too much deep thought, too many variables, but a riveting psychodrama for the neutral.
There is a reason for dwelling on this now. In the past week there has been a suggestion where that tension might be located this time. In an unexpected turn it is Kevin De Bruyne, Europe’s 2020 assist king and a genuine aristocrat of the modern game, who is causing a little bubble of concern.
Getting the best out of Kevin: it’s not a bad problem to have. This is a player so good just hearing his name conjures an instant mental flipchart: the snaking diagonal passes, the surging runs, the architectural one-twos. Only the best footballers can take this crowded, minutely analysed professional sport and make it look so easy and natural, like something you’re just making up from scratch every time.
De Bruyne is so good he has to start every game. For Guardiola this is already a flag, something he has begun to worry away at before those red-letter days, because the team has changed this season.
It has been noted City were at least as efficient when De Bruyne was injured during the recent run, that they looked solid, that his absence helped enable the less showy attacking craft of Ilkay Gündogan. City are more captivating with De Bruyne in central midfield. But they are also more vulnerable as the defeat by Manchester United seemed to confirm. De Bruyne looked, on an off day, like a jarring fit as a driving, twirling, appropriately egomaniacal central midfielder, a star playing like a star in a team that has thrived of late as a pared back collective.
Guardiola has left his best player on the bench in one of these games, the defeat at Spurs two years ago. Fire up the engines of confusion. Could this, stripped back solidity, be the gambit this time?
Happily, there is a better solution. In reality De Bruyne was there at the start of that wining run, with a sublime turn as a false nine in the win at Chelsea that sparked City’s season. He was back in a similar role in midweek, scoring twice against Southampton. This is surely the shape from here, solidity plus Kevin, and a good tactical fiddle as opposed to a wild-eyed, chased-by-a-cloud-of-midges-on-the-touchline kind of fiddle.
It makes narrative sense too. There is a possibility Sergio Agüero’s brilliance has been a diversion from this team’s final destination, the descent into pure Guardiola midfield obsession. De Bruyne has played that front role seven times in seven wins in the past year, scoring three goals with five assists. He has been playing there for Belgium. It is very easy, and consequence-free from this distance, to say: Pep, this is your destiny.
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It could be a levelling-up for them both, because De Bruyne might also fancy another little step forward. To date his hall-of-famer status is not quite matched by its rewards. Break it down and you’re looking at two league titles and the PFA player of the year. There is no real sense, as yet, of a defining moment.
This City team have it in them if Guardiola can find the right combinations. He has done this before. The club career of Messi is the story of a bold attacking experiment that got out of hand. It would be authentically Guardiola to find that moment, 10 years on, by doing something similar with his most talented attacker. Kevin and Pep: who knows, this could be the best April episode yet.