Speaking in his press conference ahead of Saturday’s trip to face Manchester City at the Etihad, Marcelo Biesla played down the quotes that came via DAZN Spain yesterday, in which he was cited as calling Pep Guardiola a ‘magician’.
The quote that he referred to read: “He’s a magical man. What he knows how to do is extremely difficult for me to try [to copy] and I’ve already given up, but I have genuine admiration for what he does.”
Asked if matches where he goes up against a coach of Guardiola’s calibre are more demanding mentally and physically,
Marcelo Bielsa said: “The games against teams who have the capacity to have answers or do things that are unexpected make the games full of surprises. When I classified Guardiola’s team or style of play as magical, I wasn’t calling him a magician. What I was trying to say was that in the process he creates so many surprising attacks. Of course, this is supported by the quality of his players. There is a method which stimulates what they do. This is the difficult thing to detect. From the outside it looks as though the managers has done something magical. What I want to is that from the outside it is impossible to detect how he manages this. There’s a code, a method that unites the individualities with what he proposes. This creates football that is full of surprises. There’s nothing nicer for a spectator to see something they did not expect. To say the opposite is when you know exactly what is going to happen, but eventually this will create boredom.”
