Pep Guardiola has built his decade of soccer success on creating teams that dominate possession but on Saturday — for the first time in his career — one of his teams had less of the ball than the opposition.
From Barcelona to Bayern Munich and on to Manchester City, the ‘Pep way’ has been built around an obsessive attention to keeping hold of the ball, reports Reuters.
But on Saturday, something strange happened - his City side beat Chelsea in the Premier League without having a majority of the possession.
The possession stat of 46.74 during City’s 2-1 win was the lowest recorded by a side managed by Guardiola in any of his 381 top-flight matches in charge at his three clubs.
The Spaniard tried to give the impression that he wouldn’t be losing any sleep about that piece of data, although it is hard to believe it won’t pique his curiosity at the very least.
“There is always one thing in your lifetime that hasn’t happened. It happened,” he told reporters.
“So, OK, I have another record, I won one game without possession. They (Chelsea) are an incredible team with Kante, Kovacic, Jorginho, so it can happen,” he said.
Chelsea’s midfield was indeed impressive but Guardiola teams have regularly played against top-quality mid-fields and still dominated the ball.
Guardiola credited Chelsea’s performance on the “courage” of their manager Frank Lampard.
“They are so good, they are an incredible team. It’s Chelsea. Football is becoming like this. Most teams and young managers have spirit and nothing to lose.
That’s why the football is nice. Chelsea are playing incredibly well,” he said.
