Defeats teach you nothing at all

... except that losing sucks

They say you learn more in defeat. ‘They’ have clearly never stood where Pep Guardiola is standing now.

Defeat teaches you about as much as a punch in the face. It hurts and haunts you, it climbs into bed with you and keeps you awake. It turns you against the world, then it turns you against yourself. It infects your reason and your judgment.

Guardiola’s champion team have suffered defeat in half the games they’ve played since the end of November. They don’t want to attend any more lessons, thank you very much. They need a crash course in how to win again. It’s the only known cure for losing.

Pep looks like he needs a break, maybe needs a golf course. Golfers are accustomed to defeat. Most professional players ‘lose’ every week. Success might be making a cut, picking up a cheque. It’s like driving for Kick Sauber in a Grand Prix or riding the rank outsider in the National. You’re happy just to make it round.

Football is not like that. It’s a never-ending bill of prize fights. When the final bell rings, somebody’s strong hand is raised in triumph and the other guy’s heart is broken. Even in the VAR age, the result is final and brutal. And each defeat seems to push the next win further from your reach.

There are ways to lose. Guardiola was big enough to acknowledge that Real Madrid were and are better than Manchester City right now. And they are not the only ones that are. He’s getting a little too much practice at being fair and gracious in defeat. Him, just him.

Nobody likes a bad loser but nobody likes being a good loser either.

Donald Trump has taken ‘bad losing’ to a new level just lately. How Pep must wish he could simply sign a few executive orders. Cole Palmer and Julian Alvarez would be back at the club in the morning, Liverpool immediately relegated into Greenland’s 3^rd Division and the Premier League disbanded altogether. Make City great again.

The real problem for Guardiola is that City were great just a few months ago. It’s the sudden loss of altitude that has created the cabin pressure that’s scratched the marks on his troubled face. We have all got our theories about how it has happened but none of us truly saw it coming. And he’s taking it upon himself to come up with theories that practically halt the tail-spin they’re in. If he can.

Him. Just him. In full view of the biggest lens in the televisual armoury, he’s there with one finger in the dam and another mapping out the next solution on a tactics board. He doesn’t kick a ball and yet he kicks every ball. All that praise heaped upon him is now sitting like a mountaineer’s rucksack on his shoulders. It’s a special feeling to reach any summit but the descent is often the most dangerous part of a climb.

Martin Brundle once told me that racing drivers feel indestructible until the first crash that hurts them. They walk away from any number of spins and shunts without the resulting whiplash shaving even one hundredth of a second off their next lap time. Then they hit a wall that doesn’t budge. Then they start to reach for the brake pedal a little more readily. Then it’s time to look for a seat in a studio or a commentary box.

Guardiola has never struck me as being arrogant enough to believe he’s bullet-proof but he has always backed himself to coach football teams in his own individual way and styles. Every innovator has to walk the border line between creative genius and mad professor and Pep’s record and standing in the game tell you he’s stayed on the right side of that boundary more often than not. But the wrong side is never far away.

With single-minded conviction comes the awful, heavy pain of living with the consequences if your beliefs turn out to be mere myths and fables. It’s that Christmas morning you realise there really is no Santa Claus.

A tactical surprise or 5 has long been a mercurial part of the Guardiola DNA. Injuries dictated some of his selections for the two Real Madrid games but Abdukodir Khusanov had never started a senior game at right-back before squaring up to Vinicius Junior in the Bernabeu. Deploying John Stones as a conventional midfield player has always been an experiment waiting to happen but City can only have had a session or two to work on the idea before the first leg. It was the defeats, more than the injuries, that forced him to improvise.

Pep is a meticulous strategist, a spectrum planner. He’s not given to following hunches or having a flutter. Gamblers don’t handle their losses very well. They have a tendency to turn in on their lives and hide the churning grief. Guardiola is taking a very personal and public responsibility for everything that’s happening on his watch. The November contract is evidence of that. He wants to put this right. Him, just him.

Success doesn’t inoculate you against failure. Quite the opposite. It just makes the latter more difficult to accept and process when it finally arrives. Two of the most competitive football people I know drew their deepest motivation from a fear of defeat. Graeme Souness and Roy Keane hated losing matches too much to ever countenance losing many. They recognised how badly they took defeat and didn’t want themselves or anyone close to them to live with the fall-out very often.

Losing taught them only that they didn’t want any part of it. They would do anything to anybody to avoid it. I suspect that Guardiola is from much the same species.

There were still 10 minutes remaining of the first-half when I asked my co-commentator Rob Green at what point City looked to minimise the damage in Madrid. At what point this serial winning machine accepted the outcome and looked to limit the fall-out from their impending Champions League exit. How difficult must defeat be to take when it’s written large in front of your eyes even before you give a half-time talk to your dressing-room full of medal winners?

In 16 seasons as a coach, Pep Guardiola has never failed to reach the last 16 of the Champions League until now. Think about that and think about how mortally wounded this proud and successful man must feel today. No quick fixes in sight and bloody Liverpool on Sunday. Pep can’t hand in a sick note on the morning of the game. Not him.

He will spend the intervening hours mulling over videos and encouraging Nico Gonzalez to get on the ball and pass forward and talking to Omar Marmoush and Savinho about finding a fresh attacking blend. Losing at the Bernabeu will have afforded him insights into what his latest acquisitions have to offer but nothing that his football imagination and intellect hadn’t hit upon already.

The biggest and maybe only lesson from Manchester City’s 13^th defeat of the season is that defeat sucks.