Pep Guardiola has channelled his inner Gene Hunt to indulge Rayan Cherki | OneFootball

There’s a moment in the first series of Life on Mars that currently explains the difference between Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta.

For those unfamiliar with the show, DCI Sam Tyler goes into a coma after a car accident and wakes up in 1973 under the command of Gene Hunt, the spaghetti hoop-eating honcho who regards rules as the basis for his own form of justice.

Hunt’s methods rub against Tyler’s ultra-modern ways of policing, influenced by data and science, until they literally bet on which of them solves a case.

Instinct or forensics? The moral of that episode is essentially you cannot have one without the other. All the forensics in the world are great, but being a policeman without instinct is useless.

You sense Mikel Arteta needs to watch a few episodes of Life on Mars. His Arsenal team rely too heavily on pre-prepared patterns without the wit to change things up when losing a game.

During their defeat to Bournemouth on Saturday, the Emirates crowd were loudly frustrated by Arsenal’s patient approach. Time was spent dallying over throw-ins, while too many passes went sideways and backwards.

Buying Eberechi Eze, one of the Premier League’s freer spirits, was supposed to be an antidote to this.

But Eze has rarely been entrusted by Arteta to be the salt in the stew, instead being moulded into another cog in the manager’s system.

It feels less like Arteta is unaware of instinct – he’s encouraged his team to play ‘freer’ in several press conferences this season – but is deliberately suppressing it in favour of control.

What elevates Guardiola above Arteta and everyone else is that he possesses an instinctive streak alongside his famed positional play.

Guardiola can drop big-name players without warning, change system mid-game or trust a weird-looking tactical tweak to oil the Manchester City machine.

Past success allows the Catalan to marry conviction with data, while Arteta’s attempt at conviction looks more like blind faith in methods currently unproven at delivering silverware.

It’s hard to imagine Guardiola indulging a maverick talent like Rayan Cherki previously in his career.

While Cherki is brilliantly talented and as unpredictable as a wasp at a picnic, trusting him is a greater leap of faith than David Silva or Kevin De Bruyne. The Frenchman remains inconsistent at times.

Yet his assist for Marc Guehi during the 3-0 win at Chelsea would surely not have been recommended by any data wonk.

Faking his corner at first was a minor piece of sh*thousery; one X user pointed out this type of behaviour would turn Cherki into a national villain if France knocked England out of the World Cup.

He played a one-two with Jeremy Doku and took off, gliding past Moises Caicedo and shaping to shoot with the entire Chelsea defence locked into a trance as if they were inhabiting a digital world.

Instead, Cherki sliced a ridiculous eye of the needle pass through to Guehi to slam home. Even Pythagoras would’ve struggled to find the angle.

“The numbers are incredible and the quality in the first season in the Premier League, he is something unique,” Guardiola said about Cherki afterwards.

“In the first half, he played close to me. Play close to [Erling] Haaland and the wingers and the attacking midfielders and use the talent that Mum and Dad gave to you.

“When he starts to do that, he will become an extraordinary player with his mindset and mentality.”

Guardiola went on to compare Cherki to a Manchester City legend.

“I’ve been with Sergio Aguero and Sergio Aguero was not the incredible high press player but he tried his best and all I ask is that…do your best and you can do it because he has another quality.

“Every player has his own ability. Rayan has something special, the second goal I said choose the pass right and he passed to Marc Guehi that I could not even see from outside.

“He is a top talent and again what I said, if Manchester City decide to bring that player in, it is because Manchester City is working really well.”

Guardiola has form for overthinking big matches, most recently in the Bernabeu with a ridiculously open line-up torn apart by Real Madrid.

Domestically, the City boss is far more balanced than in previous years. You could argue he was more ‘Sam Tyler’ than Arteta ever was, only growing out of slavish devotion to his methods with age.

But it remains the main difference between the two title-chasing managers; Arteta is overseeing another April slump, paralysed by foreboding as teams work out his tactics.