Are Galactico gaffers like Guardiola and Klopp given more leeway?

Sam Allardici must have been having a chuckle into his large glass of wine this weekend. Big gruff British Sam is not to everyone's taste. But while his Palace side completed a treble of wins against Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool, two of the Premier League's more exalted foreign gaffers, Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp, were struggling. 

Admittedly Pep's Man City were unlucky to lose to Arsenal in the FA Cup semi-final, hitting the post and bar late on. But Guardiola could end up the season without a trophy and if Man United beat them in their next fixture, finish outside the top four. 

CITY IN NEED OF A PEP TALK
Pep's first move was to oust a decent double league-winning goalkeeper in Joe Hart and replace him with Claudio Bravo, who can pass the ball out with his feet, but can sometimes let shots go straight through him. In the recent TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, there was a preposterous German architect who declared that stairs ruined his designs. You can imagine Guardiola similarly insisting that a bog-standard shot-stopping keeper is an offence against footballing impressionism. 

City are more a forward line than a team. Pep's other major defensive signing was John Stones, a fine ball-playing centre back but a player still learning when to hit Row Z. Manuel Pellegrini was sacked at Man City after winning the League Cup and finishing fourth, having won the title the previous season. You sense that such harsh standards won't be applied to Guardiola because of the trophies he has won at Barcelona and Bayern Munich. 

KOP QUESTION KLOPP
Meanwhile Jurgen Klopp might be a lovely bloke, but he still hasn't solved the problems at goalkeeper and centre back that he inherited from Brendan Rodgers. New 'keeper Karius has been dropped and Matip and Klaven haven't brought stability at the back. Ironically Klopp's best Liverpool centre back Mamadou Sakho is now on loan at Crystal Palace. Sakho was incorrectly suspended for 30 days by Uefa in April 2006 for taking a banned substance (Uefa later quashed the charges) forcing him to miss the Europa League Final. Then he was frozen out by Klopp, apparently after tardiness on a pre-season tour last summer. Sir Alex Ferguson might have been a disciplinarian, but he could also find ways of bending rules in order to keep his best players. Klopp also let go Christian Benteke who scored twice for Palace against Liverpool. 

So Guardiola and Klopp do not look much further forward than their predecessors in the task of turning their sides into trophy machines. It's likely they will both eventually succeed, but they are also lucky that their reputations have left them immune to the harsh demands placed upon their predecessors. There are questions to answer and both men might have to do something more readily associated with British gaffers and get back to the basics of a Big Sam-style strong spine.

When good gaffers get mad — the art of lashing out in the technical area

So West Ham boss Slaven Bilic has escaped with an £8000 fine for trashing a TV microphone boom against West Brom. It’s not easy for an irate gaffer to find a new inanimate object to trash near his technical area. Presumably the FA gave Bilic some credit for his innovative choice, rather than just kicking the traditional water bottle.

The FA's decision will inevitably annoy Jose Mourinho who was given a touchline ban after theatrically kicking a water bottle against the Hammers in December. As Bilic quipped after the game: “The problem is that he hit that bottle like — well it was a great volley, to be fair. He should have miskicked it! He hit it too good.”

Water-bottle kicking has also been exploited by Arsene Wenger, who once beat the ground with an imperfectly closed water bottle against Spurs and greeted a disallowed Arsenal goal at Old Trafford by kicking a water bottle only to get his angles all wrong and scoop it up into the air with his right foot.

LOTTA BOTTLES

Hitting the bottle can be a dangerous exercise for the modern gaffer. Tim Sherwood managed to pull a hamstring backheeling a water bottle when Aston Villa drew with Sunderland in 2015

Lashing out can take many forms. Tim Sherwood was also prone to chucking his gilet on the ground in a fit of pique, while more bellicose bosses have taken it out on opposing players. Alan Pardew, then at Newcastle, was banned from the touchline for seven games after going head to head with Hull’s David Meyler in 2014 while Leicester’s Nigel Pearson ‘light-heartedly’ placed his arms around the neck of the prone James McArthur in 2015.

Premier League bosses are uneasily caged in their technical areas; ready to lash out at just about anything that comes close. Perhaps we should credit Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp for resisting the urge to stamp on his own glasses during Liverpool’s recent poor run.