The Pep Guardiola chapter at Manchester City could be near its end

Pep Guardiola looks like a manager without the energy to take up the chase against Liverpool’s challenge.

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola in the dugout during their 3-2 defeat to Wolves at Molineux. Picture: Getty Images

I met a woman in a coffee shop on Saturday morning. The queue was long and slow-moving and the lady, in her mid-to-late seventies, was just in front. “Would you mind,” she asked, “if I sat down for a bit and rejoined when we’re nearer the counter? I had a hip operation two weeks ago and it’s hard to stand.”

“Not at all. Come back whenever you want.”

In no time she returned. “I feel so guilty,” she said, “sitting down while you’re all queuing.”

The lady in front of her gently encouraged her to go and sit down again and offered to get her something.

“A cup of tea,” she said.

While we waited she told us her husband had died from cancer a few days before Christmas. Once a week they would come to this coffee shop. He liked it there. They had been married for 32 years.

She told us about life with her husband. “We would have our little rows, over things that didn’t matter and he would say, ‘Look, I will put the kettle on,’ and then everything would be OK. You see, he had a good nature.”

And so she wanted to come to this coffee shop, take her tea by the window, watch the world go by and remember him.

Now, allow me to tell you what I saw when watching Pep Guardiola’s two-minute post-match interview with the broadcaster Gabriel Clarke on Amazon Prime the previous evening at Molineux. Of course, it had been a bad evening for Manchester City. Down to 10 men when their goalkeeper, Ederson, was sent off in the 12th minute against Wolverhampton Wanderers, they still managed to go 2-0 up before conceding three and losing their fifth league game of the season.

It had been an exciting game, and in a world without fear I would have asked Pep about the wondrous unpredictability of football and the insanities of the transfer market. How could Benjamin Mendy, for whom City paid Monaco £52m ($97m), have been the one to get hustled so easily off the ball for the goal that allowed Wolves to draw level in the 82nd minute? How could Matt Doherty, who joined Wolves from Bohemians in Dublin for £75,000, be the one to work a delightful one-two with Raul Jimenez, swerve neatly past Nicolas Otamendi and then sweep in a left-footed shot for the winner?

From fullback, Doherty scores more than the odd goal, while Mendy makes more than the odd mistake. So how can the slightly error-prone one be considered almost £52m more valuable than the goalscorer?

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Clarke is too sensible to put such a provocative question to Guardiola after such a gut-wrenching defeat.

“Pep,” he asked, “after 82 minutes with 10 men, all the effort and courage, did you deserve better in terms of the result?”

Guardiola tugged gently at his beard, in the way a gunslinger flexes his fingers before deciding what is next.

“The result is what it is with 10 men … We took (the) advantage and we could not defend it,” he said with unsmiling eyes.

“Was that fatigue?” Clarke asked.

“No, I don’t think so. They fought incredible, they run even to the last minute, we conceded goals. We could avoid it.”

“They could have been avoided, the goals you conceded?”

“Always the goals can be avoided. You know sometimes it is fatigue, it is tiredness, it is a lot of minutes to defend. Sometimes it is difficult.”

Consider those last two questions. When Clarke politely suggests fatigue may have been a factor, Guardiola disagrees. In reply to the next question, Guardiola puts his team’s defeat down to fatigue. In these moments one’s sympathy is entirely with the interviewer. In this kind of funk, the question to the contrarian is always the wrong one.

Such was Guardiola’s body language that a stranger, unacquainted with football, could have been forgiven for imagining that Clarke had been the author of City’s loss. To his professional credit, the interviewer refused to show any irritation or impatience with his interviewee. It was almost as though Clarke was saying, I will ask the questions politely and if you wish to be surly and uncooperative, then our viewers can see how things are.

In the end, the interviewer decided to bowl underarm.

“In terms of the mentality (of the players), you must have seen good signs?”

“Yeah, definitely,” Guardiola said, and then, quicker than a bat out of hell, he was gone.

Through their two title-winning seasons under Guardiola, City were a joy to watch. The quality of their play raised the bar in English football and inspired other teams. You could argue that Guardiola has been the Premier League’s most influential coach.

Many years ago, Jurgen Klopp was asked in an interview with Stern magazine about the most important thing in the career of a football manager.

“That wherever you were, you made it a little better,” he said. “That you gave all you could. That you loved, were loved and didn’t take yourself too seriously.”

Guardiola has made City much better, that is for sure. He is certainly giving it all he has. And there is no doubt that he is loved. The other two boxes are harder to tick. Does he love winning more than the game itself? Whether he takes himself too seriously is impossible to know but it is clear that his obsession with winning comes at a cost. Cutting his interviewer short on Friday evening, Guardiola seemed like a man beaten down by the relentlessness of it all, and like a man whose self-worth hinges on the vagaries of football games.

I thought of the elderly lady in the coffee shop and the times when she and her husband would fall out. How he would put the kettle on and then the world would suddenly seem brighter and easier to cope with. I wonder if, during the bad moments, Pep allows anyone to put the kettle on.

How long is left in his Manchester chapter? His contract runs to the end of next season but you would guess this summer will be it. He came to the Premier League and raised the bar, said to Liverpool and Klopp that to beat us you will have to get better. Liverpool have done that and now there is a new frontier.

In a perfect world, Guardiola would have the energy for the new pursuit, this sterner challenge. But right now it is hard to see it.

THE SUNDAY TIMES