![]() But he has always said that if the team can rob the ball and can score in two passes, do it. ‘People think Pep wants to produce forty passes before scoring. Positional play is a different thing: it’s passes to break lines and score goals. I think “tiki-taka” means passes that are meaningless. ‘People think he’s all about “tiki-taka”. Torrent believes the criticism goes hand in hand with a misunderstanding of what Guardiola sets out to achieve. ![]() They won’t convince me, even if he doesn’t win the Champions League, which he will.’ Guardiola failed to win the competition at Bayern Munich and this will be his first European final since Barca won it again in 2011 If someone gets very close in their work then that’s when the critics come. ![]() ‘Pep is not perfect, no one is, but he’s very close. ‘One day when he has left it all behind, we’ll say how good he was, what a genius. ‘There are no shades of grey with Pep, either you love him or you’re always looking for the slightest thing and it’s true that there has been but we don’t analyse why. It’s happened this season with Manchester City playing PSG without Mbappe, just as PSG had played Bayern without Lewandowski.’ĭoes it annoy him that people say Guardiola has failed in Europe because of that ten-year gap between finals? ‘Sometimes you get that little bit of luck too. ‘And in those three years at Bayern in semi-finals we came up against the best Real Madrid, and the best Barcelona because they had Neymar, Suarez and Messi and all of them five years younger so imagine what that was like.’ And I think Pep made changes bit by bit by trying to sign players who fitted his style. ‘But this happens sometimes with teams, you go there and you find very good players but to play the style you want to play perhaps you have to make two or three changes. ‘We inherited a good squad but we had almost 10 players who were over 31 years old. ‘If you are asking me about the first year of Pep at City,’ he says. He then moved to Manchester with him where, first Monaco, and then Liverpool, cut short City’s European adventure. Torrent went with him to Germany where Bayern were beaten in three consecutive semi-finals. It’s now ten years since Wembley, so what happened? Why has it taken Guardiola a decade to get back to a final?īarca then beat United again in 2011 as Guardiola picked up the trophy for a second time ‘Because of a volcanic ash cloud we had to arrive a lot earlier to London and Pep could work on details. ‘The second final was much better for us we dominated it from the start,’ he recalls. ![]() Two years later Torrent was back in the final with Guardiola this time at Wembley. ‘He gets up like Michael Jordan and he was suspended in the air. ‘He is short but he has so much lower body strength. ‘What people don’t know about Leo is that his head is like a hammer,’ says Torrent. I think it was the last time we ever did it!’īarcelona recovered from their bad start and won the game with Samuel Eto’o scoring the first and Messi heading in the second. ‘Motivation is good, but extremes are always bad. ‘It didn’t just motivate the players it hyper-motivated them,’ Torrent says. It’s well documented that it overshot the runway a little in terms of desired effect. The video mixed scenes from the film Gladiator with images of each of the Barcelona players. Torrent and fellow coaching assistant Carles Planchart provided images that were used in an inspirational video shown to the players before they ran out to face what he describes as ‘one of the best Manchester United teams of recent times’. Torrent knows anxiety can be a factor in finals, especially first ones.Ī part of the net cut from the goal in Rome’s Olympic Stadium after the 2009 final hangs on the wall behind him as he reflects on Guardiola’s first Champions League final as a coach 12 years ago. ‘Pique came at 19, and it felt natural to him: this is my team, my pitch, my terrain. ‘You can sign a player who has been at big clubs for years and he comes to the Camp Nou and it eats him up. Torrent says Foden has a 'special DNA' because he has progressed through the club's academy
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