金融时报:瓜帅启示录

瓜帅启示录

他年纪轻轻就缔造了一支以砍瓜切菜之势夺取一切奖杯的"梦之队"，并将艺术足球发扬光大，瓜迪奥拉成为足球世界疯狂追逐的对象。西班牙《国家报》的John Carlin认为，他的成功来自勤奋的思考、良好的习惯、以及对简单理念的不懈追求。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

novice ['nɒvɪs] n.初学者，新手

Ballon d’Or 金球奖，《法国足球》杂志和国际足联合办的世界年度最佳奖

sabbatical [sə'bætikəl] adj./n.休假，安息日

aplomb [ə'plɒm] adj.沉着，自若

English Premier League 英超联赛

rudderless ['rʌdəlis] adj.无舵的；无指导者的

intricately['ɪntrɪkətlɪ] adv.杂乱地

billiard-ball n.台球

proletarian [,prəʊlɪ'teərɪən] n./adj.无产阶级的，劳动者的

esprit de corps[es'pri:də'kɔ:r] n.团队精神

Pep Guardiola: football’s most wanted (2294 words)

In the spring of 2008 Barcelona Football Club was a big-name global brand that was losing its lustre. The ideas were running out, the competitive edge had faded, morale was low. New leadership was called for.

The board had a range of options… To the dismay of the majority of Barcelona’s 180,000 paid-up members, they chose Pep Guardiola, a novice with one year’s experience as a lower-division coach and none in the game’s upper reaches. Guardiola had been a great player and captain of Barcelona … but, it was like Sony selecting the manager of a medium-sized regional office to take over as company CEO.

In the four years that Guardiola remained at the club, they won 14 out of 19 possible leagues and cups, a feat unequalled in the history of the game. Unequalled also is the fourth consecutive Ballon d’Or, granted this month to Barcelona’s Lionel Messi, who Guardiola made even better. Barcelona achieved something more difficult to win than any official prize: the admiration of the football world. Guardiola’s team revolutionised the 150-year-old sport. Coaches from clubs large and small made pilgrimages to Barcelona’s training camp.

In May last year Guardiola quit Barcelona and took a sabbatical in New York. Imagine Steve Jobs were alive, announced his departure from Apple and signalled he was open to offers from the competition…

Inquiries came from England, Italy, Germany, Russia, France and China… Finally it was announced this week that the winner is … Germany’s biggest club, Bayern Munich.

. . .

Guardiola, whose father was a bricklayer, was born in 1971 in the small Catalan town of Santpedor. When he was 13 he left home to join La Masía, the elite boarding school where Barcelona nurture the finest young talent.

Guardiola excelled in the youth leagues of Catalonia and, aged 19, he made his debut in the Barcelona first team. A natural leader, he rose to become team captain, along the way winning the European Cup, the biggest prize in world club football, in 1992.

In 2007 he was hired to coach the Barcelona B team, where he performed with such success and aplomb that in 2008 the club board took the gamble of appointing him to run the first team. The gamble paid off beyond anybody’s wildest dreams, but last year he decided he had had enough. A severely self-critical perfectionist, he needed a break from the demands he imposed on himself and the weight of expectation placed on him by the club faithful, for whom Barça is not merely a football team, but the flagship of Catalan pride.

He thrives on New York’s culture, but his chief joy, is the leisure to spend time with his three school-aged children and Cristina, his elegant wife.

Intense and driven, his continuing zeal for his work derives from a perception that he has a duty not only to satisfy fans’ lust for victory but to raise football to an art form.

. . .

What is Guardiola’s secret? How did a man who began his big leagues coaching career aged 37 achieve so much, so soon? A large part of the answer is that he spent 24 years, from the day he arrived at the club, preparing himself for the job. Johan Cruyff, the Dutchman who as coach of Barcelona laid the foundations for the temple Guardiola built, plucked him from the club’s youth ranks into the first team. The Dutch, a magnificent player in his day, never had a more attentive pupil. Cruyff’s core message remains Guardiola’s today. Lessons one, two and three of football: keep possession of the ball. It sounds absurdly simple, but watch any game of the English Premier League, the world’s richest, and you’ll see how difficult it is to put into practice. To keep the ball, to defend by denying it to your opponents and to create more opportunities to score, you need skill, self-possession and intelligence.

He played at number four, just in front of the defence, the link man with the attack. “He had no pace, he couldn’t run with the ball, he wasn’t strong in the tackle, yet he became the axis around which Cruyff’s team revolved,” said Sacristán, a former Barcelona player, who is today coach of the Barcelona B team. “His brain worked so fast he could make those around him play at the speed of light.”

Cruyff imported the Dutch philosophy of “total football” – everybody is comfortable on the ball, everybody attacks, and Guardiola became its chief artificer on the pitch. Guardiola processed every game in his mind, every training session, every lesson Cruyff imparted. It was a habit of mind that extended to his life beyond football. Unusually for a player, he read books. He took an interest – in film, music and politics. One of his closest friends is David Trueba, a Spanish novelist and film director. Trueba wrote about him two years ago: “He is curious about a lot of things beyond football… sometimes he codifies them in his own special way. That he ‘footballises’ them … ”

Some friends warned him not to accept the job as coach of Barcelona B team, telling him the third division was “poison: the players violent, that this was no place to launch his first football laboratory”. But he took the job on, transformed a demoralised team and, as required, won them promotion.

Meanwhile, the first team was not doing so well. Under Frank Rijkaard, a former star player, they had winning the league twice, in 2005 and 2006, and the European Cup in 2006. But it was now the spring of 2008 and the team had faded, winning nothing in two seasons. Rijkaard, it was felt, had lost control of the dressing room.

A murmur arose among club members for José Mourinho to be appointed in his place. Authoritarian, charismatic, with a spectacular record of success in his native Portugal, in England and Italy, he seemed just the man to cut big egos down to size and restore drive to a rudderless team.

But Pep got the position. Murtra, a football director, told me he was convinced that Mourinho’s subsequent “frustrations”, after he became coach of Barcelona’s bitter ancestral enemy, Real Madrid, two years later.

Public opinion in Barcelona was overwhelmingly sceptical of Guardiola, yet he cried out: “Fasten your seat belts,” from the centre of the pitch, “you’re going to have fun!” But fun it wasn’t, at first. Barcelona lost their first league match to a tiny club called Numancia and then drew against scarcely much bigger Racing de Santander. The “I told-you-so’s” rang around practically every home and bar in the Catalan capital. Guardiola did not waver. He declared that he would remain faithful to his “idea”.

The Guardiola idea is, and will remain, that possession is nine-tenths of the law. That you cherish the ball as if you were a jealous lover. That if you lose it the team fights to get it back like a pack of indignant dogs. By monopolising the ball you will minimise the treacherous random factor inherent in football and you will also enjoy yourself. The misery lies in not having it. Let the other team feel that.

And that was exactly what happened. The rivals chased shadows until their legs gave way and they were put lethally, gracefully to the sword. From his third game on, he led a victory parade.

Guardiola rehearsed all manner of intricately geometrical attacking patterns in training, his players pinging the ball about with billiard-ball precision at high speed. “Pep had the rare satisfaction,” Unzué, a goal-keeping coach said, “of seeing the players apply those same moves against the toughest rivals on the field of play, as if they had been copied and pasted.”

Cruyff’s “Dream Team” won the European Cup in 1992. The Dutchman’s manner was aristocratic, and his team reflected it. They were brilliant but too often supercilious, and therefore erratic. Guardiola has always acknowledged his debt to Cruyff, but it was he who distilled the gold from the alchemic process his master began. The difference lay in the thoroughness of Guardiola’s preparation and in his greater attention to the proletarian task of defending, which he had studied in his playing days among the Italians, the masters of the art. Taking “total football” to another level, Guardiola’s players were artists but terriers too.

They would not have been had he not stressed from the beginning the central importance of team spirit. According to Unzué, Guardiola’s notion of esprit de corps extended to ancillary staff, the physios, the doctors, those in charge of the balls, boots and players’ kit.

Unzué Said, “He sent out a message to all of us that we’d be together as a team in bad times and good. On the field that translates into a spirit of fierce solidarity. Eleven players attack and 11 players defend.”

They were no ordinary 11, either – not players easy to win over. Between them they had won the European Cup and the European nations’ cup, among a host of trophies. (Eight of the team’s players won the World Cup in 2010.) Lots of very rich young men there, with very big global reputations. Guardiola subordinated them to his will. And, as Unzué said: “Practically all the players confessed it to me that Pep had made them better.” Not excluding Lionel Messi, who is on record as acknowledging he would not be the player he has become without Guardiola’s help.

Messi played on the right wing during that first season in which the team won everything and he won his first Ballon d’Or. But Guardiola never ceased to believe there was room for improvement.

Unzué said: “Messi had always been regarded, unquestioningly, as a winger, but Pep suddenly saw that he had to be positioned where he would receive more of the ball and have the greatest possible impact.” He was right. Three weeks later, in the return game against Stuttgart in 2010, Barcelona won 4-0 and Messi scored two, setting up another. His scoring rate soared, as it continues to do today. In his first season with Guardiola, Messi scored 38; in his fourth, he scored 73. Barcelona won the Spanish league for the second season. Real Madrid, responded by signing José Mourinho.

Six months later, now in Guardiola’s third season, Barcelona humiliated Mourinho’s Madrid 5-0, never before seen. Barcelona won the Spanish league for the third year in a row, plus the European Cup again.

Real Madrid were finally crowned champions of Spain in 2012.

His batteries were drained. Said Evaristo Murtra. “He needed a rest.” For his own good and, as he saw it, that of the team, which he felt he could no longer improve, he quit.

But it was not in a spirit of mourning or defeat, that the Barcelona faithful crowded into the Camp Nou one balmy evening in May to bid him farewell. The message that night was a joyous “Gracias, Pep!”, “Thank you, Pep!” All present knew, as all did watching the scenes on TV around the world, that the higher achievement of conquering the admiration of the world had been met.

. . .

Apart from recharging his batteries and spending more time with his family and fending off foreign suitors, what has he been doing in New York? Absorbing and processing information in preparation for the next challenge, as he has always done, according to David Trueba. Most obviously, by watching hours of live European football at home. Less obviously, as Trueba says, by devouring all New York has to offer. “I went over to see him and we went to shows and museums – we even had dinner with a famous economist,” Trueba said. “For the American elections he stayed up until the final result was in.”

He has no doubt been “footballising” Obama too, drawing lessons in leadership that he will apply when he gets back to coaching next season. Putting an end to months of speculation in the world’s sports pages, it was announced this week that he has signed a three-year contract with the most successful German football club, Bayern Munich. In the end, he spurned the vast salaries reported to be on offer at England’s most cash-rich clubs, Chelsea and Manchester City, and opted for a club that offers a project and an idea of football that closely matches his own. Bayern Munich, run in the main by former players with long histories of attachment to the club, has a clearly defined identity on and off the field. In recent years the football they and the German national team have played has converged with the philosophy of attractive, possession-based attacking football that Guardiola refined and perfected at Barcelona. Bayern will be expecting him to evolve the model, take it to a higher plain.

A question lingers, however. Will Guardiola be able to repeat his success at his new club? The doubters’ argument rests on the notion that he was lucky at Barcelona to have stumbled upon a spectacularly talented set of players. “With that lot, who couldn’t succeed?” goes a familiar jibe in football circles. Yes, but the core of the team he inherited had done nothing for two years and there are other clubs with excellent individuals, notably Manchester City and Real Madrid, who have not come close to Barcelona’s achievement in terms of beauty of spectacle or sheer efficacy. In the four years during which Guardiola won 14 trophies, Real Madrid won two.

The truth is Guardiola achieved what every coach at every level knows to be the true measure of success: he extracted the very best from what he had and, almost beyond imagination, he made his players even better. Lucky Bayern. He’ll do it again.

请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：

1.Which of the following is true about Barcelona under Pep Guardiola's command···

A. Pep was coach from 2008 to 2012.

B. They won all the 14 possible leagues and cups.

C. He established La Masía, Barcelona's youth training camp.

D. He enjoyed a dazzling startup when he took over.

答案(1)

2.Mr. Trueba, a novelist and film director said Guardiola ‘footballises’ a lot of things beyond football.

This can be supported by?

A. When he was a player, he became the axis around which the team revolved.

B. He learned lessons in leadership from the US Presidential Election.

C. In New York, he spent hours of live European football at home.

D. All of above.

答案(2)

3.Pep took Cruyff's “total football” to another level, by doing what?

A. By helping as much as 8 players win the World Cup.

B. By making Messi better that he won 4 Ballon d'Ors.

C. By extending esprit de corps to players and improving defence.

D. By mastering Cruyff's philosophy of "keeping possession of the ball".

答案(3)

4.Why did Pep choose Germany's Bayern Munich as his next stop?

A. They have and idea of football that closely matches his own.

B. They are run by former players.

C. He believes has a duty for victory as well as to raise football to an art form.

D. All of above.

答案(4)

* * *

(1) 答案：A.Pep was coach from 2008 to 2012.

解释：瓜帅在巴萨执教了4年，而本文一开始就讲了2008年俱乐部出人意料地任命他为主帅。

BCD都不正确，球队赢得了14 out of 19 possible leagues and cups.瓜迪奥拉14岁就加入了拉玛西亚青训营。 文章中部可以看到，他刚接手巴萨一队的前两场联赛一负一平，球迷的不信任给了他不小的压力。

(2) 答案：B.He learned lessons in leadership from the US Presidential Election.

解释：'footballise'是个有趣的词。一些朋友和队友很早都认为瓜帅迟早是个成功的教练，很大程度上因为他勤于思考——而且是从非足球领域中悟出心得，将其应用在带队执教中的能力。在纽约休息时，他不仅仅继续看球，还经常went to shows and museums，甚至还与一名经济学家一起吃饭。

(3) 答案：A.By extending esprit de corps to players and improving defence.

解释：AB都是伟大的成就，而D是“全攻全守”的精髓，但是强调克鲁伊夫的球队too often supercilious， 而他把更好的团队精神和更勤奋的防守意识贯彻到球员身上，同时把控球打法发扬到极致，这就是作者所说的another level.

(4) 答案：D.All of above.

解释：三项都是正确答案。足球理念的一致是他选择拜仁慕尼黑的最根本原因，尽管英格兰的石油富豪和酋长们可以开出更高的工资。