Zlatan to Joe

The recent episode between Pep Guardiola, the new Man City manager and Joe Hart, who was the club's no 1 goalkeeper looks to have reached a stage where Hart is set for a transfer and Guardiola is set to sign Raul Bravo in his place.

Just the day before reading about all this, I had turned the last page of Zlatan's autobiography - which was a fantastic read. I have to say, I am Zlatan Ibrahimovic is one of the best autobiographies I have read. Not for the level of writing, the deep thoughts or the hype but for being just plain brutally honest. Zlatan, of course might have an ego the size of a football field but he has his own reasons and in the end my respect for him has only gone up a notch.

Now, why I mentioned all that was because, in the book he talks about his relatively short time at the Nou camp under Guardiola and how it reached a stage where it reached an impasse. The situation back then with Ibrahimovic seems bloody identical to the one with Hart now. If you go by the book, Guardiola completely ignored and sidelined Ibrahimovic and it finally ended with him moving to AC Milan. No clear reasons for not playing him but just a "We keep our feet on the ground here". From all that, it looks like Guardiola doesn't like bigger and louder personalities than him - to be honest he is not that loud though! But that could also be just one side of the coin and Guardiola might have had a compelling reason too.

Time will tell. If and when Joe Hart pens his autobiography, I would certainly be interested in the section that talks about all this. Till then...we shall wait.