Pep Guardiola is a golf junkie, one who only last year joked that he’d swap half his vast accumulation of football gold to flourish a sand-wedge as capably as John Rahm or the immortal Seve.
he inclination today is not to compare Manchester City’s El Cid with those Spanish conquistadors, but rather to find common ground between the Premier League’s sideline Caesar and a badly bruised prince of the fairways.
A springtime chorus of the Champions League anthem appears to spook Guardiola in the same way the evocative drive down Magnolia Lane immediately diminishes Rory McIlroy.
Europe’s great prize thieves Pep of his supernatural powers, prompts him to overthink, strips away the familiar suit of certainty that is his bullet-proof domestic uniform.
On nights such as this, the supreme coach of his generation has a troubling history of morphing into Samson after Delilah flourished the razor.
Pep returns to football’s Amen Corner this evening for a contest that throws up the most intoxicating possibilities.
City confronting Bayern Munich is more than an intriguing duel of new money and one of the game’s ancient bluebloods, bigger even than a heavyweight contest between – with apologies to Real Madrid’s white knights – the continent’s two deepest squads.
It is the annual invitation to Guardiola’s theatre of neurosis, a Gold Circle pass to the playhouse that continually scrambles his brilliant brain, reduces him to a tormented Lear on the heath.
Unlike McIlroy at Augusta, Pep, the manager, has already – twice – cracked the Champions League code. But though those twin coronations, in 2009 and 2011, announced him as a sideline untouchable, they come with a Messi-shaped asterisk.
At the very least, they pose a question: Was it Guardiola’s supreme tactical vision or the genius of a little Argentine that was most important in separating Barcelona from the rest of the field?
It is a conundrum that has deepened as the years pass and Pep, stripped of his South American Sherpa, struggles to retrace those early steps to the mountain top.
When he arrived in Munich a decade ago, it was as an unstoppable conquistador, half-man, half-myth, a figure on the verge of inheriting the world.
Yet, in three years in Bavaria, he could not replicate the Champions League glory his less heralded predecessor, Jupp Heynckes, had delivered just weeks before his arrival.
Rather, there was an accumulation of calamity. A 5-0 thrashing by Real Madrid in year one, another sobering five-goal lesson from his Barca alma mater in year two before hew was outfoxed by Diego Simeone in his final season in Germany.
Guardiola’s years in Manchester have yielded endless aesthetic masterpieces while taking the English game in the kind of chokehold only Alex Ferguson had previously inflicted on the Premier League.
Pep has been innovative and imperious.
But the trend of European underachievement has continued. There has been bewildering line-fluffing against a range of inferior opponents, from Monaco to Spurs, Lyon to Chelsea. And yet another five-goal knockout humiliation, this time at the hands of Liverpool.
This annual unravelling of a transcendent coach is remarkable, inexplicable, like watching a Fields Medal winner struggling to recite his two-times tables.
It is as if Guardiola cares so much, is so obsessive about escaping the shadow of Messi that he gets in his own way.
Whatever the reason, the Champions League continues to be the kryptonite, reducing football’s 21st century Superman to a ho-hum Clark Kent.
Time and again, Pep feels compelled to meddle, to needlessly add another component to a smoothly oiled machine, to surrender to bizarre tactical or selection whims.
When he finally returned to a Champions League final two seasons ago, he stunned even his own dressing-room by dropping the ever-present Rodri and going to war without a midfield shield.
The master chef’s maniacal pursuit of some secret sauce has time and again proved self-defeating, stripping City of their customary smooth, award-winning flavours.
Thomas Tuchel was the beneficiary of Pep’s act of hara-kiri in 2021, and following his recent replacing of Julian Nagelsmann in Munich, he is again the opposing grandmaster.
But Guardiola now has an additional weapon, a Norwegian Excalibur.
Erling Haaland was recruited for nights like this, a serrated edge to enable City to cut down even the most formidable foe.
Watching Guardiola fidget and obsess over the two legs of a last-eight tie that feels like a final in all but name will be absorbing.
Can he thread the thin line between alchemy and interference to step out from Messi's imposing shadow?
Is he ready to breeze into Augusta and skip around Amen Corner like a triumphant Rahm, or will he once more stumble like a forlorn and seemingly cursed Rory?