Pep Guardiola loses control, and Tottenham may win the Champions League

Manchester City beat Tottenham in a wild Champions League quarterfinal second leg on Wednesday, but failed to make it through to the semifinals.

There’s no explaining some games, and so let’s not even bother to try with Manchester City’s Champions League quarterfinal second leg win against Tottenham on Wednesday, a 4-3 nonsense-fest in which four goals had been scored with 12 minutes, and five within 22. There’s no explaining some games, but how about whole cup runs?

The defining trait of Pep Guardiola’s City side is their control — of the ball, of the space, of their opponent. They dominate matches to a point at which it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether there’s any point in watching at all. They don’t just win, they win so comprehensively it’s hard even to appreciate their obvious, immense quality.

What, then, to make of City’s 2018-19 Champions League campaign, and Guardiola’s recent European record more generally? In City’s 10 European games this season, they’ve lost one and drawn one against Lyon, come from behind against Hoffenheim (twice) and Schalke (once) and played one of the silliest quarterfinal ties in history against Tottenham.

Of course cup competitions are more subject to chance — a lucky deflection here, a Fernandon Llorente hip there — than the weekly grind of a league season, but City have had more wild Champions League games this season than they’ve had league games since the beginning of 2017-18.

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Their exit also means Guardiola’s run without a Champions League title will extend through an eighth year, his last coming with Barcelona in 2011. This doesn’t, contrary to arguments circulating in certain, dumb corners of the internet, make him a failure, but his strange lineups, these wild games, are now firmly a part of his legacy as a manager.

As for Tottenham, whose manager has also taken far more criticism from the “what’s he won?” brigade than he deserves (which is none), it’s hard to overstate the significance of this win. A season that seemed only a month ago to be drifting listlessly into an uncertain, transfer non-spending future, could now qualify as their best since the inception of the Premier League in 1992.

That they did it without Harry Kane, away from home, after conceding in only the fourth minute, to a team who have dominated most of their recent encounters, only underlines how far Spurs have come under Mauricio Pochettino. And now, to top it all off, they’ll play one leg of their first ever Champions League semifinal in their brand new stadium. This is the future, and it’s already bright.