Bernardo Silva, the total player of Manchester City | sports

Alphonso Davies and Jamal Musiala were Bayern’s only escape route. The first is a formidable laterally who could be an Olympic 200 meter. The second is a tireless marathon runner. Both have quicksilver feet and high beams to see what will happen before the rest. Both ran into a terrible problem on Tuesday night at the Etihad. In his area of ​​influence, Pep Guardiola placed a slight Portuguese man with a shipwrecked beard and sad eyes. It was the ruin of Bayern.

Bernardo Silva, as the man is called, did not let Davies leave his field more than a couple of times in the first hour of the game, and his connections with Musiala became sporadic and accidental. Guardiola explained it after the skirmish. With certain footballers, the plans are simplified. “You can say to him: ‘Today you play in this position.’ And you don’t have anything else to say,” said the Manchester City coach. “I have been lucky enough to train very good players here, at Barça and at Bayern. Bernardo is one of the best I have upset in my life, absolutely. Is something special”.

They say in Spain that the Tiki Taka belongs to the past. That the future of football is “the transition”. The fashionable word. The violent, fast, long routes, they proclaim, are the vanguard. But it turns out that in Manchester, in what could have been an early Champions League final, contrasted with one of the strongest and most energetic teams in the world —the kings of the transition—, Bernardo Silva, 173 centimeters tall and 64 kilos weight, it emerged that the heart and mind prevail over power.

Under the gaze of the manual coach, Bernardo Silva is not a striker. He is not extreme. He is not a midfielder. He is not inside. He is not a pivot. Fed up with thinking, Jorge Jesús, the first coach to coach him in the professional category, at Benfica, made him play on the wing. “Bernardo is a player of football”, said Jorge Jesús, behind the scenes. Marginalizing him to the side was an invitation to leave. He was 19 years old and had a comfortable life, thanks to a bourgeois origin. But he panicked. So much fear of not reaching a professional who since then plays every game as if every minute on the field decides between being and nothing.

“I think it doesn’t matter what position you play,” he said Tuesday at midnight as he left the locker room. “In football we all have to attack and defend. In different positions you have to defend in different ways. But even if you’re a winger or a winger you have to do your job to help the defence. I have worked a lot on that since I played in the Benfica academy. My coaches required me to defend a lot since I was a kid.”

At 28 years old, Bernardo does not express resentment. Nicoles. The fame of De Bruyne and Haaland overshadows his media figure. But his mental state is constant. Always grateful, always suffered, always realistic. Always very Portuguese. “Bernardo is a soccer player!” Guardiola says, when asked what kind of role this difficult-to-classify lad has on the pitch. “He can play everywhere because he understands the game perfectly, every action with and without the ball. Look at Davies today. Against Davies he did a perfect job because Bernardo knows that if he starts you can’t stop him”.

Davies was the fastest, but Bernardo defended him before he received the ball and Bayern’s transitions appeared before he was born. He did something similar against Leipzig in the round of 16, during the 7-0. Put to explain the key to that win, Guardiola pointed out the teacher again: “He is very intuitive to close passing lanes. I put it there [de falso extremo izquierdo] to sever that incredible connection between Gvardiol and space. He has the ability to know how to pressure three players in two moves. There is not a single footballer in the world who can do something like that. It is not a physical matter. It’s intelligence.”

“I am destroyed”

Bernardo, concludes the coach, “has the ability to read the positions and give us an extra pass. In these games he is essential because he can play pivot or false nine; now he even he is scoring more decisive goals. Let’s not forget: last year against Madrid in the semifinals it was also decisive [hizo el último gol del City en el 4-3 del Etihad]”.

Guardiola seems exhausted. Pale. Wet after two hours in the rain until the final 3-0, a colossal result considering that Bayern had only conceded two goals in eight games this season in Europe. “Don’t worry? Emotionally I’m destroyed!”, acknowledged, the technician, haggard. “I have wasted ten years of life tonight.”

They could have been more if Bernardo Silva had not been there to solve half of the dilemmas posed by the tie.

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