Pep Guardiola isn’t losing his religion, but it’s time to practise long throws

There’s a difference, though, between fashion and permanent reinvention. Today’s orthodoxy is tomorrow’s outmoded creed. The Pep-ification or Guardiola-isation of English football was a great leap forward, a university course. It was never going to be the end of history.

Its reach into the grassroots game was astonishing. To be taken seriously, to be on the Guardiola train, coaches at all levels had to break the news to defenders and goalkeepers. From now on, they said, we don’t clear our lines, knock it long or panic in possession. Oh no. We play to feet, move into space, hold our nerve and pass coolly from one end to the other. It became a badge of honour.

The one-way-to-play faith became so pervasive that non-believers feared a knock on the door in the night. Sam Allardyce, a refusenik, said this week that pressure to conform “scared the living daylights out of coaches”.

Guardiola still prefers a style derived from his work at Barcelona. But at Arsenal last weekend he posted a top-flight career-low of 33.2% possession. In his first season at Manchester City it was above 70%. People said he was like José Mourinho, parking the bus. Guardiola can impersonate Mourinho any day he likes, but Mourinho couldn’t imitate Guardiola. He lacks the imagination.

The definition of what’s acceptable – and effective – has shifted. We don’t know yet how fans will receive the shuffle back towards centrism, towards variety. Evo-stik, Ryman and Calor League keepers and centre-backs are bound to sleep more soundly. The trends are there. Drawing on rugby coaching vantage points, Luis Enrique has started watching Paris Saint-Germain from high in the stands.

Twenty-one of the City keeper Gianluigi Donnarumma’s 27 passes against Arsenal went long. Manchester United (Benjamin Šeško), Everton (Thierno Barry), Newcastle (Nick Woltemade) and City (Erling Haaland) have strikers who are 6ft 5in or 6ft 6in. The small false nine is replacing the giant on the endangered list. Fundamentalism may be waning, but the fundamentals changed the English game for ever. An intense memory from Anfield is of seeing Guardiola’s City displaying infinite nerve against Jürgen Klopp’s gegenpress. With huge spaces between their defenders, City passed their way out of tight spaces with impeccable precision. They owned – and loved – the ball.

Sweeper keepers are more fun to watch than hoofers. To see the ball softly received, controlled and precisely moved is better than seeing it bounce off feet and shins. Dexterity is here to stay. Yet Premier League football is heading back towards pragmatism, long passing and physical strikers. Audiences are adjusting to the change.

“Putting it in the mixer” will never return to elite football. Hit and hope is gone. The swarms of assistant coaches couldn’t justify their salaries if they just told players to launch it. The new mode is quarterbacking, with pre-arranged targets, and fast breaks of the sort Haaland feasts on.

Guardiola is not losing his religion but the stats say he has altered it. And if he has, so too must his acolytes – the disciples of ball retention and rotation.

The “football men”, feted but then slated, are probably not coming back. Sporting directors and hedge fund moguls will not be returning power to managers who thought they were the most important person at the club.

But long throws, set pieces and long diagonal hits to players stationed wide are no longer heresy. The long throw, once a calling card of route one football, no longer offends. Specialist analysis by data crunchers has reframed it as retro, cool, almost clever.

Letting go of Guardiola-ball won’t be hard, so long as the best bits are retained. The shift does, however, raise the question of where Premier League football is going next, as an entertainment, and whether fans will approve.

Today’s 16- to 30-year-olds have no lived experience of football in the 1980s and 90s. They will not fear its return. To older generations, the struggle to consign the worst bits of the “English way” to history was a duty. England was out of touch with the global mainstream of passing and possession. And we needed foreign help to break a century of insularity.

The long story of England’s national game is a study in conservatism. But when Guardiola brought a version of Barcelona’s orchestral play to Manchester, a vogue became the governing idea.

Good goalkeepers were disparaged if their “distribution” was anything less than laser-guided. Stoppers had to be good starters, too. But it was hard, stressful, risky. There were other ways to play, which Guardiola has acknowledged by recruiting players not from the tiki-taka mould (Donnarumma, Tijjani Reijnders, Omar Marmoush).

He marched English football up the hill of his ideas and seems to be marching it back down – for now. The view up there was good. Time now to practise those long throws.

Photograph by David Price/Getty Images