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

Barcelona that
houses the offices of the Presidency of Catalonia. It was no accident that Barcelona’s returning heroes presented their first European trophy to the cityon the exact spot
from where, almost fifteen years earlier, the former Catalan president Josep Tarradellas had used a similar expression to announce his return from exile (‘
Ciutatans de Catalunya, ja soc
aquí
’, ‘I am finally here’). Guardiola, a Catalan referent of the team, of the club, understood the significance of FC Barcelona’s coronation as a European
superpower and its role now clearly established as an iconic symbol of the nation.
    ‘That night at Wembley was unforgettable: my greatest memory. It turned into a party that carried on through the following Liga matches,’ remembers Guardiola. Just a few days later,
Barcelona, led in midfield by the young Pep, won an historic league title in truly dramatic fashion. On the final day of the season, Real Madrid travelled to Tenerife as league leaders needing a
win to secure the title, something that many saw as a foregone conclusion. Yet after taking a 2-0 lead in the first half, a shambolic second-half collapse saw Madrid lose the match and, with it,
surrendered the league trophy to their rivals in Barcelona.
    Cruyff was transforming a club that had, before 1992, been successful on the domestic front yet had failed to impose itself upon the European stage and established Barcelona as a genuine
international power. In fact, Cruyff did more than set a unique footballing model in motion: he challenged Barcelona fans to confront their fears, to overcome the sense of victimisation that had
been a constant feature of the club’s identity since the beginning of the century. This team, a collection of brilliant individual talents such as Ronald Koeman, Hristo Stoichkov,
Romário, Michael Laudrup, Andoni Zubizarreta, José Mari Bakero and Pep Guardiola pulling the strings in midfield, combined to become synonymous with beautiful, yet effective, fast and
free-flowing football that became universally known as the Dream Team.
    The year 1992 continued to be a magical one for Pep as a footballer and, not long after the European Cup success, he found himself celebrating a gold medal win at the Barcelona Olympic Games.
Yet, Guardiola has bitter-sweet memories of the experience with the national team: ‘It passed me by like sand slips through your fingers,’ he recalls.
    The Spanish Olympic football squad convened almost a month before the tournament at a training camp some 700 kilometres from Barcelona, near Palencia in northern Spain,
where, according to Pep, he behaved ‘like a complete idiot. I say it that clearly because that is just how I feel when I remember that I was distant and made myself an outsider from the
group. I didn’t show any intention of integrating, nor sharing in the solidarity that team members who have a common objective must show. My team-mates, despite being kind, would have at the
very least thought that I was full of myself: a fool. In the end, when I woke up from my lethargy, I ended up enjoying playing football with a team full of excellent players: guys with whom I
managed to forge strong, consistent friendships that have lasted until this day. The friendship, a triumph, as much as the gold medal we won.’ Some of the players in that Olympic Spanish side
– Chapi Ferrer, Abelardo, Luis Enrique (then at Real Madrid), Alfonso and Kiko – would go on to form the backbone of the senior national team throughout the following decade.
    That summer Guardiola earned a reputation for being a little strange, a bit different from your average player: a label that, within certain football circles, he has been unable to lose. If the
distance he placed between himself and the rest of the national squad upset some, his intensity in games and training frightened others, distancing him even further from those who had little
interest in understanding the game. José