This is Pep's dark night of the soul ..is it the path to redemption or a road to perdition

AS the old certainties vanished, as he shed a sense of superiority that had once seemed his eternal birthright, Pep Guardiola receded further and further into the armour of his sarcasm.

- ROY CURTIS

Impotent to halt Manchester City's swift and startling slide into mediocrity, the Catalan eminence increasingly showcased the personality of an electric fence.

To get too close, to quiz or agitate the great conquistador as his Etihad dominion crumbled and the centre of the Premier League empire relocated to Anfield, was to invite a shock of high-voltage ridicule.

All death stares, icy smiles and mocking, caustic one-liners (I'm delighted to have failed"), it was self-evident that Guardiola experienced last season's dimming of his alpha status as a form of existential agony. Encountering the foreign concept of a lower caste life of ordinariness, this giant of a generation's sanity appeared, at times, to be hanging by a thread.

After a life of relentless success and ticker tape parades - 12 league titles in 15 seasons in three countries, three Champions Leagues, an unprecedented Premier League four-in-a-row, a New Testament of tactical innovation - there he was, alone and tumbling in a blinding rectangle of light, his angel wings clipped.

Whether or not the emperor can strike back offers perhaps the most gripping of sporting storylines in the months ahead.

Robert Louis Stevenson is best known for Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but the 19th century Scottish author also penned a line that fits the brutal, draining world of football management like a glove.

"After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through." Guardiola looked on as his most substantial rival Jurgen Klopp stepped off the rink, the German admitting the relentless pressures had worn him down, emotional fatigue sapping the energy that had made him Liverpool's dynamic forcefield.