\n<\/p>\n
One way or another, this was always going to end up being a Pep day. At the final whistle Pep Guardiola didn\u2019t punch the air or really celebrate at all. Instead he walked quite slowly over to the scorer of the only goal, Antoine Semenyo, and vigorously triple-patted his buttocks, then meandered around the edges of the bobbing huddles on the Wembley pitch.<\/p>\n
There will be a temptation to look for clues here. Nobody really knows if Guardiola is leaving Manchester City at the end of the season. Contract extension brinkmanship is nothing new, although not with quite so much whispered chat about assistants on the move and leaked replacement plans.<\/p>\n But the pensive walk was normal practice. It is one of Guardiola\u2019s many quirks that even in victory he tends to look a little disappointed that the game, this glorious living torture, is now over. Do the thing you love and you\u2019ll never work a day of your life. Do something that grips you with skull-clawing, trouser-ripping energy, and you\u2019ll never quite lose that life-giving buzz, right down to the end of your 591st game, 416th win, and 15th major trophy.<\/p>\n Guardiola was the familiar frenzied spectacle throughout this FA Cup final. Dressed for the day in a vanilla-hued yak fur roll neck and country gent slacks, the look of a minor royal cousin on a school visit, he was out in his technical area from the start, arms whirring in those furiously stylised patterns, like a man trying to break the world record for constructing an invisible flatpack wardrobe.<\/p>\n If this really is his final big touchline moment, it would be fitting that it should come at Wembley, with a third FA Cup, eighth domestic knockout trophy and 12th medal won on this ground if you chuck in the Community Shield and Barcelona lifting the Champions League.<\/p>\n It is often said that Guardiola has been commendably and respectfully obsessed with domestic cups in England. Is it respect? Or just the blanket obsession with winning? You suspect he might be equally respectful of a game of Connect 4 with his niece on Boxing Day, or trying not to step on the cracks on the pavement on his way home.<\/p>\n But this was a good Pep day in many ways. City started the game without any real midfield craft, but shifted at half-time, bringing on Rayan Cherki. The decisive second-half goal came from a player signed in January for just this kind of moment. It was made by Erling Haaland, who took the ball deep, spun in behind for a return pass from Bernardo Silva. Semenyo steered Haaland\u2019s right-footed cross into the corner off the inside of his heel, the finish that doesn\u2019t really have a name, the Sharpe-flick, the Kanu-twirl.<\/p>\n Semenyo was a fitting Cup final match-winner, a player who has taken his own one-man pyramid ride to get to this point, from Bristol to Bath to Newport to Sunderland. The goal here will rubber-stamp the success of his move, which is still a slightly odd one in the wider context. Semenyo is a decisive player. But he isn\u2019t elite in the classic Pep way. He\u2019s not hyper technical. His touch can be clunky. He doesn\u2019t seem pathologically obsessed with holding the ball. Pep isn\u2019t signing this guy 10 years ago.<\/p>\n But then, we have all come a long way in this relationship. Even the agent of change is changed by the act of changing. A decade ago it would have seemed an unexpected outcome that the great moderniser, the duke of the elite Iberian style, should become so deeply entwined with the FA Cup.<\/p>\n By now that annual Wembley date feels like the perfect embodiment of Guardiola status as both an outsider, the systems brain who doesn\u2019t coach tackles, and also the biggest structural influence on how the game is played now in England; navigator of the City pirate ship, 115 charges, suing the league into the ground, but also deeply plugged into English football\u2019s traditions, a one-man guardian of the domestic cups.<\/p>\n There is always a slight sense of tenderness on these occasions now. Here it comes, the dear old Cup, still running through its moth-eaten routines. Still the marching band? Still the tinfoil trophies, the bed sheet banners? Still Ronnie Radford?<\/p>\n