Chelsea manager Maurizio Sarri did the unexpected and caught Pep Guardiola unprepared last time. How did it happen and will it happen again?
Pep Guardiola is often mistaken for a pure idealist. He is not. While he keeps his ideal of football on a pedestal, he will still look for pragmatic solutions to problems that arise.
But on that note, he also expects other idealists to remain idealists. That is how Maurizio Sarri was able to gain an advantage over Guardiola the last time the two played. Sarri kept his overall ideal, but he opted for a pragmatic solution (Eden Hazard up top, two defensive wingers) which caught Guardiola by surprise.
Guardiola will be prepared this time. Guardiola is ultimately a manager who believes in finding solutions to problems and he will have prepared his side for anything he thinks Sarri might do. This has the makings of another interesting tactical battle.
Simply put, Guardiola’s formation is based around M’s and W’s on offense and it varies on defense. That is why he is perfectly able to play almost any combination of players because he can adjust the instructions to make it work. Five attacking players will form one letter and five defensive players will form the other and that is the basis for everything. They can be narrow, wide, shallow or deep and it gives Guardiola a lot of flexibility.
Take the recent match against Arsenal for instance. Many said that Guardiola was using two systems depending on whether they were attacking: 4-3-3 on defense and a 3-2-2-3 on offense. But every manager has a defensive shape and an offensive shape and the only thing that really made Guardiola’s unique was Fernandinho shuttling up from the back line as the team transitioned to offense and back as they transitioned to defense (normally it is the opposite).
That was injury and rotation enforced in part, but it shows how Guardiola has several ways to create his M’s and W’s. How Chelsea reacts will depend on the shape and the width of the shapes.
Once those shapes are determined, there are largely two ways to beat Guardiola’s teams. The first is to sit back and absorb pressure (as Chelsea did last time) before countering through the space they leave behind due to their high press. The second way is to counter press them so ferociously that they cannot adapt quickly enough.
Jurgen Klopp has used both, often in the same match, to trip Guardiola up before. Sarri will likely reuse his previous plan of absorbing and countering which Guardiola will be far more prepared for this time out.
Sarri can gain an advantage at that point by flipping the script back to Chelsea’s normal style of play. He has had a week to work on that plan and could pull off another shock victory against Guardiola.
It is all about adapting to Guardiola’s own adaptations, something Sarri did last time (against his normal work) and something only Klopp has been able to do consistently. City is not unbeatable; it just takes a smart manager willing to change things at the right time and a well drilled team. With a week off between matches. Sarri can show that Chelsea is that team.