It's very easy to cast Pep Guardiola as a tactical ideologue sticking rigidly to his principles come hell or high water. The architect of tiki taka (a phrase he hated) still obsessed with his team putting together "a thousand, million boring passes" a game, as he joked before the international break. At least I think it was a joke.

But this characterisation is wide of the mark. Guardiola is far too savvy to be pigeonholed, even if he still is by people who usually use the Catalan as a convenient shorthand for the possession-dominant game that has ruled the last 15 years of modern football.

If Guardiola was only about possession and control, then his methods would never have stood the test of time. What a lot of Guardiola clones in modern management don't realise is just how adaptable h

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