Stan Collymore had ‘absolutely deluded’ Pep Guardiola bang to rights (in 2016) | OneFootball

An awful lot of time has passed since Pep Guardiola v Stan Collymore threatened to define the next era of the Premier League.

‘If he thinks he’s going to turn up and outplay everybody in the Premier League, and that teams like Watford, Leicester, Bournemouth, Southampton and Crystal Palace are going to let his Manchester City side have the ball for 90 per cent of the time and pass pretty patterns around them so they can get a result, then he is absolutely deluded,’ Collymore once wrote of a man who duly proceeded to win six of the next eight Premier League titles; there was eye-rolling at the claim he would be ‘a game-changer for English football’.

And it prompted a glorious degree of head loss from the journaliste when Guardiola quite justifiably responded with bafflement to one of his countrymen asking about Stan Collymore in a press conference.

Yet perhaps Collymore was right. Belatedly so. And also categorically not. But here the Manchester City manager is in 2026, explaining after his latest embarrassing failure to beat Spurs that “what happened in the Premier League today, sometimes you can control it, but the way the game is in England, this happens sometimes”.

Guardiola’s wider point was about “momentum” and how Manchester City suddenly struggled to manage it in a game they seemed likely to cruise after heading into half time 2-0 up, before barely holding on to draw.

But that inability to handle “momentum” properly has, beyond periods in individual games, summed up their season. A Manchester City side applying the title pressure has gone from a run of six consecutive wins to a single victory in their next half-dozen games.

“The moment is difficult to control in England,” Guardiola said of a comeback Spurs completed in 17 minutes, a matter of days after assistant Pep Lijnders spoke to the media about “how the Premier League looks at the moment”: physical, tireless, with a focus on set pieces, long balls, transitions and duels.

That evolution is where the Premier League might finally have caught up with Guardiola, whose attempt to fight fire with fire is evident in their recruitment but still lagging slightly in competition with Arsenal, the prime purveyors of current trends.

Antoine Semenyo, Rayan Cherki and to a lesser extent Omar Marmoush are prime producers of the key “actions” he felt Manchester City ultimately fell short in against Spurs and in previous games this season. Gianluigi Donnarumma, too, even if the level to which he is being called upon is damning.

But it is becoming clear that Manchester City are now trying to fit a mould rather than setting it themselves.

Guardiola isn’t so ‘absolutely deluded’ as to think he can singularly fight that tide again and shift the needle once more, but his limitations as a coach finding his place in a new tactical landscape rather than personally defining and shaping it have been laid bare.