Scrutiny of Pep Guardiola’s style adds to City bid for Champions League survival

Manchester: There is a place in the Champions League semifinal to be won at the Etihad on Tuesday as Manchester City seek to overturn a three-goal first-leg deficit against Liverpool.
But there is also something more at stake. The problem when a manager is so ideologically driven as Pep Guardiola, when he pursues such a distinct and defined style, is that every big game becomes a debate on that style and that leads to some peculiar narrative framing.
When Guardiola plays Jose Mourinho, the pattern is simple: The true heir of the Barcelona philosophy laid down by Johan Cruyff against the fallen angel, the rebel who was formed as a coach in that system but then broke away. When Guardiola faces Jurgen Klopp, the narrative is a little more complex.
On the one hand there is Liverpool, the heaving passion of Anfield, shimmering with the memories of an increasingly distant successful past, a club that once seemed to outsiders a cold, ruthless winning machine, but that has been transformed by long years without success into a vehicle for nostalgia. Klopp, emotional and ebullient, is the perfect fit for the most sentimental of English clubs.
And on the other there is the brooding intellectual, an artist whose teams can produce football of exquisite beauty but whose (very occasional) outbursts often seem slightly peevish. There is the club that was built to his specifications, with their fine modern stadium that sits not amid the red-brick terraces of City and English football’s past but surrounded by a vast sporting complex redolent of an out-of-town business park.
When these incarnations of Liverpool and City meet, it is a battle of chaos against order, passion against intellect. It is not an entirely fair portrayal — Klopp is clearly extremely adept at organizing his side and Guardiola equally clearly cares very deeply about winning — but it is undeniably how it feels. In that structure, City, far from carrying the torch of progressive football, become something rather more menacing: Hugely expensive and capable of inflicting immense damage on opponents but undermined by one fatal flaw — Guardiola’s sides have so often been let down, amid otherwise excellent seasons, by rapid-fire flurries of goals conceded.
Saturday’s defeat by Manchester United followed the pattern that cost Guardiola’s Bayern Munich in Champions League semifinals against Real Madrid and Barcelona, and cost City against both Monaco last season and twice at Anfield this campaign: Two or three goals conceded in a 15-20 minute spell.
This is more than simply City having a glass jaw. It is about the reaction to conceding a goal and the way City so often are left reeling. English football has suffered for years from a reliance on the leaders who are supposed to make a difference when it really matters.
Subservience to the Guardiola system has left City with the opposite problem: The absence of a player to grab a game and wrench it back in their direction — at times, it feels, at least from an emotional point of view they could really do with a Roy Keane or a Steven Gerrard.

KEY CLASH
RAHEEM STERLING VS ANDREW ROBERTSON
It was the battle that did not happen in the first leg, as Pep Guardiola surprisingly omitted the England winger, preferring instead to field Ilkay Gundogan in an effort to seek greater control over the game. City, though, were more unsettled by the change than Liverpool and Sterling will surely return today, looking to stretch the play and put pressure on Andrew Robertson, Liverpool’s marauding left-back. Robertson missed Saturday’s 0-0 draw against Everton with a calf injury but should be available. Sterling, meanwhile, did play in City’s defeat to Manchester United but suffered a strangely ineffective game, missing three first-half chances, two of them extremely good ones. Sterling, though, is City’s second-highest scorer this season behind Sergio Aguero, and if they are to get back into the game he almost certainly has to have a positive impact.