The Guardiola Death Stare

Pep Guardiola has been manager at Manchester City since July 2016 and has had limited opportunities to practice his death stare since joining.

Manchester City have the best and most famous football manager in the whole world – Pep Guardiola. Since arriving in England he has been subjected to persistent doubt and criticism in parts of the media, but has largely dealt with this through good humour.

In his first season he was suffering regular diatribes in the press – usually from those of a red persuasion – about a perceived lack of defending. This led to him famously declaring he was “not a coach for the tackles”.

This season some of his mood appears darker and he is far from his media assertions of being “so,so happy” – which are already seeming like a lifetime ago.

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There is of course plenty going on behind the scenes, likely to cause a rising ire in Guardiola. He is losing players to injury, he feels under attack from every corner, particularly in relation to UEFA and FFP. He finds himself having to do so much more than just talk about football – he is rapidly becoming the public face of the whole City Football Group.

These pressures have grown still further in the last week as the Bernardo Silva tweet has taken on a whole life of it’s own and monopolised every news bulletin.

So, it is fair to say that Guardiola is not in a position where he is willing to suffer fools gladly. He started being wound up though in the pre-match Press conference by Guardian reporter Jamie Jackson. Jackson has previous form for this dating back to 2014 when Guardiola was at Bayern Munich.

On the pitch though mattters came to the fore. Ridiculous and incomprehensible decision making by the referee – specifically in relation to the refusal to award penalties  – resulted in Guardiola remonstrating angrily with the fourth official on the touchline.

We could all see as the referee was marching to the touchline exactly what was going to happen next. This referee was determined to make a point and climb to some notoreity on the shoulders of Pep.

In the most dramatic fashion ever, the referee marched up to Pep and brandished the yellow card with a flourish, worthy of the hammiest actor of all time. Guardiola though to his eternal credit, stood transfixed, absolutely unmoved and simply stared at the referee. And kept staring!

This was the famous death stare of the single most intense manager of all time and watching it was hilarious, leaving us with a lasting memory and a fantastic photograph to commemorate this incident for all time.