Why I hope Pep Guardiola halts this current doom spiral and avoids the fate that befell his idol Johan Cruyff, writes RIATH AL-SAMARRAI

Pep Guardiola has been here before. Not as a manager, as we all know by now, but as a player he once stood in the grandest of sporting cathedrals and it crumbled around him. As those walls fell, not even his idol, the architect of everything he believes in, could prevent it.

We have to travel back a few years to find that point and I wonder if any memories have resurfaced in his mind during this remarkable crisis at Manchester City.

You see, what happened to Barcelona in the 94-95 La Liga season has some eerie similarities to what we are witnessing now. That was Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona, of course. Or, to use their moniker from the era, the dream team.

And what a dream they were – there was Koeman, Romario, Stoichkov and Hagi, with Guardiola perhaps the most valuable cog of all. When he opened his eyes, he saw the world how Cruyff saw it. When he opened his mouth, Cruyff’s teachings came out.

Devastatingly brilliant and occasionally fallible to their own genius, that Barcelona side, and especially the earlier versions containing Michael Laudrup, could be viewed as an artist’s truest impression of football. Cruyff’s football. The football of 1,000 disciples, none greater or more loyal than Guardiola.

But empires end. After winning their fourth straight league title in 1994, and three seasons on from lifting the European Cup for the first time, Barcelona nose-dived spectacularly. Laudrup had been sold in the summer, Romario was too preoccupied with the notches on his bed post to last beyond January, and ages were creeping upwards – five of the squad were into their 30s by then and Cruyff’s irascibility with the board was going to unhealthier places.

The Catalan was the midfield lynchpin in Johan Cruyff’s all-conquering Barcelona side of the early 1990s

In a matter of months Cruyff’s reign at the Camp Nou collapsed, and he departed the following season

And so all that was right went wrong. From a position of reigning champions, they plummeted down to fourth, traceable to a patch between March 10 and May 5 of 1995 when they contested 10 games, drew five, won one and lost four, not counting their exit from the Champions League quarter-finals against Paris Saint-Germain.

Guardiola, Cruyff’s Rodri, played only 45 minutes in that stretch. An ankle injury did for the rest of it and when he was missing, it all tended to go to pot. Again, Rodri. But he was there, watching from the sidelines as something beautiful collapsed.

In the 35 years of his adult life in football, that was the most violent dip he has known. Rather, it was until this one, which has been worse. More arresting and harder to fathom.

When we consider what is happening to Guardiola’s Cruyffian monument at City, there will always be a reflex to believe this is a blip. That they will awaken at any moment. Maybe even against Manchester United on Sunday; probably in time for a resumption of good service next season, if they aren’t bombed back to the stone age by lawyers.

But then I think of Cruyff again, because the parallels to that 94-95 slide jump off the page. Those four straight league titles. An ageing dream team that contained the reigning holder of the Ballon d’Or – Hristo Stoichkov then, Rodri now – and somehow smashed into a wall relatively soon after a crowning European achievement. With PSG next on City’s Champions League horizon, with survival in the competition in jeopardy, no one knows how closely the present will ape the past.

For Cruyff, the finest mind in the history of football, according to Guardiola, there was no resurgence after the crash. No recovery. That season was the beginning of his end as an active manager – he was sacked a couple of weeks before the close of the following campaign. Aged 49 and having already endured ill health, he was pretty much done, save for three years with the Catalonia national team from 2009.

He had been driven out by power struggles with Barcelona’s board, but also, just maybe, he was tortured by the frustrations that come with being a temperamental genius. A genius who couldn’t process that there were limits to his magic and methods.

To listen to Guardiola lately is to hear a tired soul contemplating his end in club football when his City deal expires. It is to hear the exhaustion of a broken, burnt-out man of 53 who has so rarely had to process sustained failure; a genius struggling to process why his magic has also stopped working because he has always been so damned good.

Guardiola’s recent comments are indicative of a manager who has rarely had to process sustained failure

Man City enter Sunday’s Manchester derby with just one win in their last 10 in all competitions

He talks of injuries, but they aren’t the full picture. He knows it. He knows they aren’t the sole means to this end, same as Romario’s focus on a different kind of scoring didn’t work alone in killing that great Barca side. Throughout City’s rut, Guardiola has still been in a position to field sides containing better players than most they are facing, so it isn’t a catch-all excuse, just as no comparison between Guardiola and Cruyff can ever be precise.

They are men bonded by a style that one pioneered and the other perfected. Idealists who stand almost in isolation for their places in the game’s history and their influence in how it is played.

But Guardiola will never be forced out of City in the way Cruyff was at Barcelona – he doesn’t have enemies in a house built specifically for him. And he doesn’t have so many extremities in his persona, so we won’t ever learn of him smashing a chair in the vice-chairman’s office like Cruyff did. He won’t get sacked and shout: ‘God will punish you for this deed.’

He isn’t Cruyff. And yet he is the nearest we have known to him and he has hit the same wall that they once ploughed into together. What was so right has become wrong, all over again, and that takes us to a quite prescient quote from Guardiola on Cruyff.

It is easily lost among others he has provided on his mentor. But it exists in the pages of a magnificent book Simon Kuper wrote a while ago about Barca and feels relevant now, because it was about Cruyff’s gift and also his downfall.

This is what he said: ‘If a genius does it right, and that’s nearly always, the result is perfect. But if a genius does something wrong, it goes so incredibly wrong that you want to murder him. Only geniuses take those risks.’

The task now is for Guardiola to try and stop the rot and reverse the club’s fortunes away from the doom spiral

Guardiola knows genius better than most. And he knew Cruyff better than anyone outside his own family. He idolised him, understood him, learned from him, improved his vision and mastered it.

My hope, as an admirer of sporting beauty, is that their points of similarity do not extend much further than they have already gone. That this doom spiral is halted, and more for the sake of preserving one of the greatest ever managers than a state-owned club.

It would be a far more fitting tribute to Cruyff if Guardiola could pirouette on the ball and the turn the other way at speed.

Spurs frustration reaches boiling point

Tottenham can be a maddening club and Ange Postecoglou has had a maddening week. Barely 24 hours after saying he would never criticise a player in public, he launched Timo Werner under a bus. 

He wasn’t wrong – Werner’s performance against Rangers was dire and hardly isolated. But it was risky and it wasn’t necessarily the right target.

That was hit far more cleanly, and to far greater risk, by Cristian Romero in questioning the man upstairs. 

If Daniel Levy conducted his duties with a greater appetite for adventure, Postecoglou would never be forced to rely on loan signings best known here for failing at Chelsea.

Spurs coach Ange Postecoglou slammed Timo Werner for his performance against Rangers

He has also claimed Cristian Romero was wrong for publicly criticising chairman Daniel Levy

Dubois deserved SPOTY recognition 

There has been a certain amount of the usual hand-wringing about the omission of Mark Cavendish from the Sports Personality of the Year shortlist. 

Great athlete, sure, and 35 stage wins on the Tour de France across his career is all the proof he needs. But I’ve no issue with him being left out – it would have felt like recognition of lifetime achievement rather than his work in the past 12 months. 

By the correct standard, Daniel Dubois would have far more cause to be aggrieved. He battered Anthony Joshua in a way beyond even Oleksandr Usyk and won a world title. He deserved to be on there.