Pep Guardiola has revisited old tactic to prepare Man City players for ‘defining’ week

Erling Haaland hadn’t trained with Manchester City for a week and his assessment of working under Pep Guardiola needed just one word – crazy.

When City players past and present are asked to describe Guardiola, they may not go as far as Haaland’s headline-grabbing verdict, but they still use words like ‘intense’, ‘obsessive’, and ‘genius.’ Guardiola himself admits that he holds incredibly high standards, and the few insights we get into his training sessions suggest that those are maintained every single day.

The city put four past Tottenham in January, but Guardiola made sure his players knew their attitude wasn’t up to scratch. The turnaround since then has been admirable, yet you can be confident the intensity demanded by the manager has been maintained. So why has he sanctioned a holiday break just before a week he describes himself as season-defining?

From Saturday lunchtime after City beat Newcastle, the squad was given the best part of three days off to do whatever they wanted. Guardiola told them to ‘forget football’, and assured them that he would be doing the same. The squad seemingly didn’t need telling twice.

Bernardo Silva and Ilkay Gundogan went on a joint trip to Milan with their partners, Julian Alvarez went skiing, while Ruben Dias and Nathan Ake also got away from Manchester. Erling Haaland looked to be enjoying some downtime, while Jack Grealish this week announced a huge new boot deal with Puma.

Guardiola has regularly stressed the benefits of his players switching off from football, but with such a packed schedule they rarely get the time. Since the resumption of the season after the World Cup, City has played 18 times in 75 days, at an average of once every four days. There have only been three free midweeks in that time, all within a month of his public criticism of their application.

In the last 30 days, City has played eight times, with six away from home totaling 3,400 miles traveled and only an average of 3.5 days between fixtures. In the last three weeks, it’s been a game every three days, and 3,000 miles of travel. No wonder they need a break.

But with Guardiola calling the next three fixtures in the coming week ‘defining’ in terms of how successful City will be this season, some may consider it a risk to sanction brief holidays at such an important juncture of the season. Come next weekend, the worst-case scenario would see City 11 points behind Premier League leaders Arsenal and out of both the Champions League and FA Cup.

That is why Guardiola said the fixtures are defining, although City will be confident of getting past Burnley in the FA Cup and will look to take advantage of playing the second leg of their Champions League last-16 tie with RB Leipzig at the Etihad. They can do nothing about Arsenal playing in the league when they are in their cup quarter-final, but they will pick up a game in hand on the Gunners.

Guardiola must feel that giving his players a little bit of time off will be beneficial in the two weeks before the international break. After that, they will have 11 Premier League games and potentially five more cup fixtures to fit in before the end of the season just 58 days later.

Get to the Champions League and FA Cup finals, and City will be playing all but one midweek until the final day of the season. There will be no chance for any more holidays or time off until the summer.

So the manager has done what he has benefitted from in the past – taking a step back and letting his players reset a little before they have to go again. He’ll have seen the return of the pre-match huddles from his side and has spoken about the feeling that City is back in terms of their motivation to fight for another title. They are defending each other again, and the results are starting to reflect that.

On Saturday, he wrote in his program notes: “I am delighted with their attitude. The way we have fought for everything has been great, the mood in the locker room is exceptional and training is really, really good.” Those issues he saw against Tottenham in January appear to have been rectified.

Earlier in the campaign, there may have been a danger of sanctioning a two-day break mid-season. Now, it feels as though a temporary switch-off from football could be exactly what City needs.