Pep Guardiola was surprised by the roof of the Bernabéu, but the City coach is no longer scared by anything. Neither stage fright is so scary when the match is in the first leg nor does the roof produce the same effect even if the stadium had already experienced a comeback before the quarter-hour mark of the match.
“I like to see the sky,” says Pep. He and his teams, Over the years they have learned to respond in different ways to the challenges that the parties present to them. The Spanish coach's Bayern died on the counterattack in two semi-finals against Real Madrid and against Atlético de Madrid, being technically superior and dominating a large part of the matches.
But that did not save him, for example, from a painful 0-4 against Ancelotti's Real Madrid on the way to the Décima. Now City also responds when it comes to running. He continues to dominate the games, has more possession and attacks more, but he was able to equalize the game when he was faster. He had the ball 60 percent of the time, but he shot less on goal, twelve times compared to Real Madrid's fourteen.
Guardiola evolves and makes his teams evolve until he is able to impose himself with different styles. And he also recovers from blows as hard as the one he received two years ago, in the season of comebacks, when in the 89th minute of the second leg he was classified for the final and two blinks later he was playing an extra time that left him in the path.
Guardiola and City have come out of the Bernabéu alive in the last two qualifiers, but there is something that has not changed in the last two seasons. Haaland has been a ghost devoured by Rudiger on both occasions.
He lost half of the duels and aerial balls and in the ones he won, Rudiger was not at his side. The German won 75 percent of the duels during the match. Haaland's inconsequentiality in the game is explained with numbers, the same ones that recognize him as the best scorer of the moment. He only finished once on goal.
Haaland was annulled due to the vigilance of the Madrid defender and the nature of the match, a constant back and forth in which the Norwegian feels out of place. Between runs back and forth he watches the game go by.
«Against Madrid on this field the game never ends, but little by little we have been changing it,” Guardiola explained after the game. «If you attack in an orderly manner there is nothing to do. We moved a lot to try to get them out,” he says. And so he balanced the game based on the difficulty of stopping Real Madrid's runs. «You're worried all day about how to control their transitions. It is impossible”.