Free Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography by Guillem Balagué Page A

– and to avoid it you must have good vision. It’s a domino effect. You soon get a sharp eye for detail, for players’ positions. You can apply this when
you are a player and a coach, too. Guardiola learnt that way – thanks to his build – and he was lucky enough to have had a coach who had experienced the same thing.’
    Once established in the first team, the best piece of advice Rexach gave Pep is one that he likes to repeat to his midfielders today: ‘When you have the ball, you should be in the part of
the pitch where you have the option of passing it to any one of the other ten players; then, go for the best option.’
    Guardiola has said on numerous occasions that if he was a nineteen-year-old at Barcelona today, he would never have made it as a professional because he was too thin and too slow. At best, he
likes to say, he’d be playing in the third division somewhere. It might have been true a decade ago and perhaps even true at many other top clubs today, but not at FC Barcelona; not now. His
passing range and quick thinking would fit wonderfully into the team he coached – and his leadership skills must not be forgotten either; as it soon became evident in his playing career; he
didn’t just pass the ball to his team-mates, he talked to them constantly.
    ‘Keep it simple, Michael!’ shouted a twenty-year-old Guardiola on one occasion to Laudrup, the international superstar. The Danish player had tried to dribble past three players too
close to the halfway line, where losing the ball would have been dangerous. ‘That
was
simple,’ Michael replied with a wink. But he knew the kid was right.
    Just seven months after his debut, Pep was not only one of the regulars, but also a leading player with immense influence in, at least up until recent times, the best Barça team in
history: Cruyff’s Barcelona won four consecutive La Liga titles between 1991 and 1994.
    In the 1991–2 season, Barcelona had qualified for the European Cup final to be played against Sampdoria at Wembley, something that for Pep, both as a
culé
and player, represented the culmination of a dream. The club had never won that trophy.
    The night before, in the last training session in London before the game, striker Julio Salinas and Pep were arguing about the number of steps up to the famous balcony where the cup was
collected at the old stadium. ‘There’s thirty-one steps, I’m telling you,’ argued Pep, for whom accuracy was important as he has a weakness for football mythology and
rituals. Salinas, who loved winding Pep up, got a kick out of disagreeing with him. Zubizarreta, the keeper, couldn’t bear to hear them squabbling any longer: ‘The best way to resolve
this is to win the game tomorrow! When we go up the steps to collect the cup, you can bloody well count them then, OK?’
    Seventeen months after his debut, on 20 May 1992, Guardiola, as expected, found himself in the line-up of the European Cup final. Before heading out on to the pitch, Johan Cruyff gave his
players a simple instruction: ‘Go out there and enjoy yourselves.’ It was a statement that embodies an entire footballing philosophy and was central to Cruyff’s principles; yet
for others, its simplicity, ahead of such a key game, might be considered an insult to the coaching profession.
    As Barcelona fans, players and directors were celebrating wildly after Ronald Koeman fired home a free kick in the final moments of the second half of injury time, at least one person wearing a
Barça shirt had something else on his mind amidst the chaos and euphoria. As the stadium erupted while one by one the Barcelona players held aloft the trophy known as ‘Old Big
Ears’, Zubi sidled up to Guardiola and said: ‘You were wrong, son, there’s thirty-three of them. I just counted them one by one.’
    ‘
Ciutadans de Catalunya, ja teniu la copa aquí
’ (Catalans, you have the cup here), cried Pep Guardiola from the balcony of the Generalitat Palace in