Late summer 2008, Barcelona lose 1–0 in Soria against little Numancia on the

opening day of the league season. A tough baptism for the debutant coach, Pep
Guardiola, made all the harder when the result isn’t much better in their
second game against Racing Santander, a 1–1 draw at the Camp Nou. Two
weeks into Guardiola’s career in charge of Barcelona’s first team and they still
haven’t won.

Barcelona’s Andrés Iniesta: ‘I was a victim of

something that terrified me’
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Pressure builds, the criticism is intense. But Guardiola remains steadfast.

Sergio Busquets and Pedro Rodríguez, then two virtually unknown players
from Tercera División, Spain’s fourth tier, are in the team. There are doubts,
of course. Concerns.

In the media, it seems that only one voice defends the manager, but at least it
is the voice: Johan Cruyff. That softens the blow, his authority alone enough to
challenge the doomsayers, but still they prophesise doom.
“This Barcelona looks very, very good,” Cruyff writes in his weekly column for
El Periódico de Catalunya. “I don’t know what game the rest of you watched;
the one I watched was unlike any I have seen at the Camp Nou in a long time.”
Cruyff, the great ideologue of the Catalan club, its philosopher king, had seen
Guardiola coach the B team and was impressed; now he stands against the
tide, alone in defending him. “The worst start to a season in many years. Just
one goal scored, and that was a penalty. That’s an inescapable truth,
numerically speaking,” he admits. “But in footballing terms, this must be read
a different way. And Guardiola is the first to read it differently. He’s no novice,
lacking expertise, and he is not suicidal. He watches, he sees, he analyses and
he takes decisions.”

Guardiola himself agonised over those decisions too. He was holed up in his
Camp Nou office, down in the basement where there was no natural light,
going over the situation again and again, rewinding and replaying the videos,
re-reading his notes, wondering what to change but convinced of one thing:
his idea, Cruyff’s idea, had to be maintained. He would persevere, however
hard it became. And support was about to come from an unexpected source.
He was still going over it, endlessly, when he heard a knock at the door. “Come
in.”

“Hello, míster.”

A small figure poked his head around the door, and spoke calmly. “Don’t
worry, míster. We’ll win it all. We’re on the right path. Carry on like this, OK?
We’re playing brilliantly, we’re enjoying training. Please, don’t change
anything,” said Andrés Iniesta.

Guardiola couldn’t believe it.

The request was short, but heartfelt, deep. It caught Guardiola off guard,
barely able even to respond. If it was a surprise that anyone should seek him
out to say that, it was even more of a surprise that it was Iniesta, usually the
silent man. It came as a shock, even more so when Iniesta closed by saying:
“¡Vamos de puta madre!”

“De puta madre,” roughly translated as, “We’re in fucking great shape, we’re
playing bloody brilliantly.”

“This year we’re going to steamroller them all,” he added.

And then he closed the door and left.

That’s Andrés. He doesn’t say much, only what he really has to. It’s like
scoring goals: he doesn’t score often, either. But when it’s needed, there he is.

Guardiola will never forget Cruyff defending him in print. And he will never
forget Andrés appearing at his door. He’ll never forget that they were right,
too. At the end of the 2008–09 season, Barcelona had won six titles. All six.

“People usually think that it is the coach who has to raise the spirits of his
players; that it is the coach who has to convince his footballers; that it is his
job to take the lead all the time,” says Guardiola. “But that’s not always the
case. It wasn’t the case at the Camp Nou for me, and in my first year at Bayern
Munich something similar happened as well. It’s not often things like that
happen and when they do, they rarely come to light. People always think the
coach is the strongest person at a club, the boss, but in truth he’s the weakest
link. We’re there, vulnerable, undermined by those who don’t play, by the
media, by the fans. They all have the same objective: to undermine the
manager.
“You start, you lose at Numancia, you draw with Racing, you just can’t get
going, you feel watched and you feel alone and then suddenly, there’s Andrés
telling me not to worry,” Guardiola continues. “It’s hard to imagine, because
it’s not the kind of thing that happens and because it’s Iniesta we’re talking
about, someone who doesn’t find it easy to express his feelings. And after he’d
gone, I asked myself: how can people say that coaches should be cold when
they make decisions? Impersonal? That’s ridiculous! How can I be cold,
distant, removed with Andrés? Sorry, no way. Eighty-six per cent of people
didn’t believe in me [according to an online poll]. Lots of people wanted
Mourinho. We hadn’t won, hadn’t got going. And then Andrés comes and says
that! How am I supposed to be cold? It’s impossible. Sod that! This goes
deeper. This isn’t cold, calculated, and nor should it be. There’s no doubt:
Andrés will play with me, always. Because he’s the best. And because things
like that don’t get forgotten. Why did he come to my office? I don’t know.”

Andrés Iniesta ‘doesn’t run, he glides’, says Pep Guardiola, left, who coached the Spain international at Barcelona

Lorenzo Buenaventura is a part of Guardiola’s coaching staff, in charge of

physical preparation. He has followed Pep from Barcelona to Bayern and from
there to Manchester City. He shares this memory with Pep now, offers up an
answer too.
“Why? I suppose because that’s the way he felt; I suppose because it mattered
to him,” he says. “Andrés doesn’t do anything he doesn’t truly believe in; he
does it because it feels right to him. He’s genuine, always.” Guardiola
concedes: “Maybe he spoke out because he could see that there was a method
we were following, that everyone was training well, that we explained to them
why we did things the way we did, and above all because that was the kind of
football that he had been brought up on, ever since he was little.”

“There were other players who sent us little messages,” Buenaventura insists.
“That’s true,” Guardiola admits. “But Andrés’ message was powerful. How
could I forget that? I can still see him standing there at the door, looking at
me. ‘De puta madre.’ And then he left. I thought: ‘Well, if Andrés says so …’”

Andrés and Cruyff were proven right; Guardiola’s decision to maintain that
philosophy was vindicated. In week three Barcelona scored six against
Sporting Gijón and never looked back; everything fell into place, it all worked
so smoothly. Within a few months, they had become a model to aspire to. Not
just because of the results – no one had won a treble in Spain before, still less
six trophies from six – but because of the way they played, the way they
treated the ball, fans, even opponents. Theirs was a different approach, a way
of seeing and expressing football that was embodied by players like Iniesta.

“We never seem to treat Andrés the way we should; we don’t seem to recognise
him. He’s the absolute business as a player,” Guardiola says. “He never talks
about himself, never demands anything, but people who think he’s satisfied
just to play are wrong. If he thought he could win the Balon d’Or one year, he’d
want to win it. Why? Because he’d say to himself: ‘I’m the best.’

“I think Paco defined him perfectly,” Guardiola says. Paco Seirulo was
Barcelona’s former physical coach, the man from whom Lorenzo
Buenaventura learnt; now Guardiola makes Seirulo’s description his own.
“Andrés is one of the greats. Why? Because of his mastery of the relationship
between space and time. He knows where he is at every moment. Even in a
midfield where he’s surrounded by countless players, he chooses the right path
every time. He knows where and when, always. And then he has this very
unique ability to pull away. He pulls out, then brakes, then pulls out again,
then brakes again. There are very few players like him.

“There are footballers who are very good playing on the outside but don’t
know what to do inside. Then there are players who are very good inside but
don’t have the physique, the legs, to go outside. Andrés has the ability to do
both. When you’re out on the touchline, like a winger, it is easier to play. You
see everything: the mess, the crowd, the activity is all inside. When you play
inside, you don’t see anything in there because so much is happening in such a
small space and all around you. You don’t know where the opposition is going
to come at you from, or how many of them. Great footballers are those who
know how to play in both of those environments. Andrés doesn’t only have the
ability to see everything, to know what to do, but also the talent to execute it;
he’s able to break through those lines. He sees it and does it.

“I’ve been a coach for a few years now and I have come to the conclusion that a
truly good player is always a good player,” Guardiola says. “It’s very hard to
teach a bad player to be a good one. You can’t really teach someone to dribble.
The timing needed to go past someone, that instant in which you catch out
your opponent, when you go past him and a new scenario opens up before you
… Dribbling is, at heart, a trick, a con. It’s not speed. It’s not physique. It’s an
art.”

Lorenzo Buenaventura says: “What happens is that Andrés brakes. That’s the
key, the most important thing. People say: ‘Look how quick he is!’ No, no,
that’s not the point. It’s not about speed, about how fast he goes; what it’s
really about is how he stops and when, then, how he gets moving again.”

Guardiola adds: “Tito Vilanova defined him very well. Tito used to say:
‘Andrés doesn’t run, he glides. He’s like an ice hockey player, only without
skates on. Sssswishhh, sssswishhh, sssswishhhh …’ That description is
evocative, very graphic, and I think it’s an accurate one. He goes towards one
side as if he was skating, watching everything that’s going on around him.
Then, suddenly, he turns the other way with that smoothness he has. Yes,
that’s it, Andrés doesn’t run, he glides.”

Guardiola adds: “Sometimes in life, it’s first impressions that count and the
first impression I have of Andrés was the day my brother Pere, who was
working for Nike at the time, told me about Iniesta. I was still playing for
Barcelona myself and he said: ‘Pep, you’ve got to come and see this kid.’ It was
before the final of the Nike Cup. I remember getting changed quickly after
training and rushing there, dashing to the stadium. And yes, I saw how good
he was. I told myself: ‘This kid will play for Barcelona, for sure … he’s going to
make it.’ I told myself that, and I told Pere that too.

“On my way out of the ground after that final when Andrés was the best player
on the pitch, I came across Santiago Segurola, the football writer. I said to
him: ‘I’ve just seen something incredible.’ I had this feeling that what I’d just
witnessed was unique. That was my first impression of Andrés.
“But later,” Guardiola admits, “I came to really value something else Andrés
does, something that he had made me see with time: the importance of
attacking the centre-backs. No one does it. But watch and you see it. If the
central defender has to step out, everything opens up; the whole defence
becomes disorganised and spaces appear that weren’t there before. It’s all
about breaking through lines to find space behind them. Open, then find.

“For example, we set up our attack so that Leo Messi could attack the central
defenders,” Guardiola explains. “We had to attack in such a way as to get the
ball to Andrés and Leo so that they could attack the central defenders and that
opened them up. When we managed that, we knew that we would win the
game because Leo scored goals and Andrés generated everything else:
dribbling, numerical superiority, the ability to unbalance the game, the final
pass, both to the outside and filtered through the middle. He sees it all and he
has that gift for dribbling that’s so unique to him. That dribbling ability is
everything today. And it was Andrés who opened my eyes to the importance of
an inside forward or midfielder being able to dribble too. If he dribbles, if he
carries the ball and goes at people, everything flows. With time, I saw that.”