It appeared to be a curious final act to one of football’s most illustrious careers.

Pep Guardiola, a serial champion with Barcelona, spending the twilight of his playing days with the largely unknown Mexican club Dorados de Sinaloa in a city – Culiacan – best known for its ruthless drugs cartels.

As it happened, Guardiola, then 35, was restricted by injuries to just 10 appearances in the Mexican league and couldn’t prevent Dorados from suffering relegation.

But while this six-month Mexican detour in 2006 was of little reward for Guardiola the ageing player, it would prove of immense value for Guardiola the aspiring coach.

It wasn’t exactly a burning desire to play in the Mexican league that enticed Guardiola there but the opportunity to work under Juan Manuel ‘Juanma’ Lillo, the genius coach he would describe as ‘the maestro’.

Now, Guardiola is one of the most successful coaches on the planet following seemingly endless success with Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City.

And he has seized the opportunity to work again with his coaching inspiration Lillo, only five years his senior, at the Etihad Stadium.

Lillo, 54, is poised to replace Mikel Arteta, now Arsenal manager, as Guardiola’s assistant manager from the start of next season.

Back in 2005, Guardiola actually spent 10 days on trial at Man City when Stuart Pearce was in charge but rejected the offer of a six-month contract to play under Lillo in Mexico.

It proved the best managerial education Pep could have wished for. The pair would sit and discuss tactics, training structures and man management techniques long into the night.

As Guillem Balague writes in his biography of Guardiola, ‘Another Way of Winning’: ‘Pep sometimes worries that he can bore his friends to tears with his one-track conversations about football, football and more football. He had no such fears when it came to his relationship with Lillo.

‘Pep hasn’t talked football anywhere near as much as he has done with Lillo – who, along with Johan Cruyff, represents the biggest influence upon his evolution as a manager.

‘When he needed answers he would turn to Lillo at any time of day: ‘How do you solve this type of situation? ‘If I do this what will happen?’

As Lillo would later say of their conversations: ‘Guardiola is a sponge, he learns from everybody because for him anywhere is a good place to talk about football, to confront ideas and turn a game into a passion.’

It proved to be six invaluable months of learning for Guardiola, confirming that he wishes to make the transition into coaching.

Returning from Mexico to Spain in May 2006, he enrolled on a coaching course in Madrid and the following year took charge of Barcelona’s B team.

A year after that, he got the top job at the Nou Camp and the rest if history.

But Guardiola’s friendship with Lillo went back much further than their post-dinner discussions in Mexico. Their paths first crossed in September 1996 when Guardiola was still a dynamic defensive midfielder for Barcelona.

They had beaten Lillo’s Real Oviedo 4-2 in what was Bobby Robson’s first game in charge but Oviedo had presented Barca with more problems than most opponents.

It was after the game that Guardiola, intrigued by Lillo’s methods, sought him out and struck up the first of many discussions about football.

Lillo was one of the first advocates of the 4-2-3-1 system that has pretty much become the go-to set-up in modern football. He favoured high-pressing and, as Lillo described it, ‘positional play’.

‘The principal idea is that the players pass the ball to each other in close spaces to be able to pass to a wide open man,’ he once explained.

This approach clearly rubbed off on Guardiola, whom Lillo once affectionately described as ‘like my son’, as did the importance of meticulous preparation.

Lillo has a library that contains 10,000 newspapers and magazines on football, with nothing left to chance in match preparation.

He isn’t dissimilar in this regard to Leeds United boss Marcelo Bielsa, another who influenced Guardiola.

And like Bielsa, it hasn’t necessarily worked out every time for Lillo on a long and nomadic coaching career that began when he was just a teenager.

Lillo never played football professionally, but first coached aged 16 at local side Amaroz. Four years later, he took charge of Tolosa in the Spanish fourth division.

The youngest coach to attain Spain’s national coaching badge, he first deployed the 4-2-3-1 formation when at Cultural Leonesa in the early 1990s before shooting to wider prominence when leading Salamanca from the third tier to LaLiga.

At 29, Lillo became the youngest ever manager in Spain’s top-flight though their stay there would prove brief.

Likewise Lillo’s tenures at the majority of his clubs since on a journey that has taken him extensively around Spain then to Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Japan and China.

His methods certainly aren’t for everyone and arguably his greatest successes have come as an assistant, including under Jorge Sampaoli for the Chile national side and then Sevilla.

Recent years have seen Lillo in the Far East, first managing the likes of Andres Iniesta, David Villa and Lukas Podolski at Vissel Kobe in Japan, then with Qingdao Huanghai, who have former City midfielder Yaya Toure in midfield, in China.

With his mother ‘seriously ill and needing urgent care’ in Spain, Lillo left his job in China this week and though he hasn’t formally accepted the City post yet, he is the frontrunner to be Guardiola’s right-hand man next season.

Guardiola’s decision to appoint someone he deeply respects and trusts, as opposed to a more glamorous name such as Vincent Kompany or Xabi Alonso, also suggests he is committed to City for the long term.

The impending Court of Arbitration for Sport appeal against their two-year Champions League ban had raised concerns that Guardiola might be spirited elsewhere if the verdict goes against City.

For Guardiola, the opportunity to work again with his coaching mentor could well take City to another level.

SOURCE:- allfootballapp