In the elite football of the last 20 years there is an imprint of Pep Guardiola and, consequently, also one of the coaches who most influenced the current Manchester City coach. Between 2019 and 2022, Guardiola had Juan Manuel “Juanma” Lillo as an assistant in England. Lillo now works at Al Sadd, in a technical team with Portuguese and where Pedro Pereira is.
“It has been a great challenge,” he begins by explaining over the phone with TSF goalkeeper coach “They deprived us of 15 players from the national team who were already concentrated with the national team [do Catar]. In that first half of the season we didn’t manage to score many points. That ended up conditioning our main objective, which was to win the championship, ”he points out.
With the possibility of still winning the Copa del Rey and the local Super Cup, the daily work in Juanma Lillo’s coaching staff has been an enriching experience, points out Pedro Pereira: “Juanma is a coach who has the ability to awaken in us the need to look at the phenomenon and reflect on it in the sense of perceiving the meaning of things, and not doing something detached”.
The Spanish coach demands that the members of the coaching staff constantly reinvent themselves. “It always requires us to be able to think above average about what we do, what we prioritize when we talk about building training, what we say and do.” Each exercise, measured in light of the context, is different from what both Lillo and Pedro Pereira were used to in European football.
“The Arab player has a different culture and a different way of being in training than what we are used to in Europe. He has forced me to adapt the way I work a bit. I am with two of the best goalkeepers in Europe. Qatar, Saad Al-Sheeb (33 years old), Meshaal Barsham (25 years old)”, points out the Portuguese goalkeeper coach.
“In conceptual methodological terms, Juanma Lillo is a special person, in my opinion quite competent and above average. This requires me to know how to listen, learn, but also reflect on what for me was a certainty, a given. I don’t think my way of working has changed much. But I can say that I have been reflecting more on what I do”, points out the coach who, in Portugal, worked, among others, with goalkeepers such as Diogo Costa or Claudio Ramos.
Source: TSF
