Please don’t compare Guardiola with Our Bob, they are absolutely streets apart, for example Bob had more technical nous on the end of his finger than Pep has had in his entire career, Period !!
Obviously a different era of football, but it was when football was still football and not completely fu**ed with corruption and oligarchs buying success, Bob would be spinning in his grave knowing the millions being spent in today’s game, yes Bob spent money, plenty of it but it’s counted in hundreds of thousands not hundreds of millions,
Every club Pep has managed he has inherited a group of players already established, already a going concern familiar with each other, playing as a unit in a system not too different from his own style, all he has had to do is tweak here and there and obviously introduce a higher calibre player here and there, he is the Epitome of a cheque book manager, he lives off his own fraudulent reputation as one of the best in the world where in actual fact, if you put say a Tony Mowbray level manager in where Pep has been it’s arguable not much would change,
Sir Bob, practically won the f***in lot with his humbling style, his quiet demeanour pulled the wool over many many eyes and he was as sleekit as they come, some of his signings were absolute genius, his very first signing turning Ray Kennedy from half decent forward to midfield maestro was indeed Genius, and thereafter built for me arguably the best Midfield 4 this club have ever had imo, Kennedy, Souness, Case, Macdermott, that 4 were for me the proper ‘Fab Four’ and F**k all to do with insects,
What you do have to consider is that between 1974 - 1978 Liverpool were more or less still in transition, Bob took over a very good but ageing side, Ray was first to arrive in ‘74’ followed by Phil Neal, Terry Mac, Joey Jones, Dave Johnson, Kenny, Hansen, Souness, Alan Kennedy, Ronnie Whelan in ‘79’, start of the eighties, he brought some skinny Welsh bloke from Wrexham,Ian Rush, a crazy Zimbabwean GK,Bruce Grobbalaar, a hairy arsed Aussie known as Skippy, Craig Johnson, Lawro from Brighton, Crisp munching maniac Stevie Nicol, and a thick Irishman called Beglin, there were others too who didn’t pull up too many trees to be fair but all in all that lot above cost a little under £4.4m, yes your eyes may well indeed water, but this is a measure of how much greedier football has become under the foresighted oligarchs,
Just imagine how much that lot would cost now ?, in his Nine years at the helm Sir Bob won THREE European cups, it’s called the Champions League now with its new hat on, but back then it was straight knock out over two legs H&A, so the draw itself was and could be dramatic, just your luck then if you were drawn against some backwater ale house team at the arse end of the Siberian peninsula,
Pep G is clearly a very good manager, he has a way of getting thru to whatever bunch of players he’s coaching, but I’d like to see him on a shoestring budget, I dunno maybe having too much money at your disposal actually undermines your own stamp and takes you down the buying for the sake of buying route, see the Grealish signing for a perfect example of that,
All I know for sure is, if you gave the financial freedom to Jürgen Klopp, akin to what Pep G has spent, I think we would all have to find a new sport, cos it would just become boring watching one club win absolutely everything season after season after season after season, wash rinse repeat,
Comparing Pep G with Sir Bob Paisley is utterly and completely futile, they virtually are miles apart in terms of man management, the structural rebuilding of a European super power, the tactical nous of a artist at work, and all in all the most humblest down to earth bloke ever to have graced the corridors of Anfield.
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