Claudio Ranieri is, by common consent, one of football's nicer guys. So we can rule out spite and presume old-fashioned honesty as the motivation for one of the most damning assessments of a team this season.

After Leicester City's goalless draw with Manchester City on December 29, Ranieri was asked about his next match, against Bournemouth. 'Believe me, it's more difficult,' he said. 'They are in good condition, they press a lot and move the ball very well.'

He probably didn't mean it as it sounded. Manchester City move the ball around nicely, too. But ferocious pressing? Good condition? Let's face it, if City had Leicester or Bournemouth's work ethic, the title race may already be as good as over.

It is a question of when, rather than if, Pep Guardiola will join Manchester City after leaving Bayern Munich

Claudio Ranieri, one of the nicest men in football, was dismissive of City after his a draw with them

And that is why Pep Guardiola is coming to Manchester.

The rest of the Premier League elite have every right to be worried by a managerial change that is no longer a matter of if, but when. It hardly matters whether Manchester City attract Lionel Messi or a whole realm of galacticos; it is the man on the touchline who is the game-changer.

Guardiola will transform the club, with diligence. Ranieri was right. City are a fine team, but they do not present the physical challenge of many Premier League inferiors.

If they get the ball, and play, they will win. If an opponent competes with them physically, there is no guarantee.

Between travelling to Sunderland on September 22 and Watford on January 2, Manchester City did not win a league game away from home.

Good competitive teams, like Arsenal, Tottenham and Stoke, beat them; Leicester and Manchester United, hard-working and organised, earned draws. So, less excusably, did Aston Villa.

City have been linked with the likes of Lionel Messi, but it will be the coach who makes the real difference

City should be playing most of those sides off the park; and they would do, if they worked as fiercely as Guardiola demands.

At the end of his first season with Barcelona, Guardiola spoke at a coaching conference. He did not lecture on tiki-taka, attacking football, the best use of Messi or any element of aesthetic perfection. His specialist subject was as gritty as a goalless draw away from home. Recovering possession.

It is his thing. Guardiola's teams defend by keeping the ball, and stage one of that process is winning it back. They press high, because that reduces the distance to the opposition goal. The logic is unquestionable: why win the ball 30 yards from your line, when you can win it 30 yards from theirs?

In training he works on the five- second rule, the maximum time allowed to regain possession, crowding out spaces and passing options. Guardiola teams harry in numbers, two or three players, while the remainder stay compact in support.

It is an intense process, often flooding a quarter of the pitch with the majority of the outfield group, but when successful in advanced areas the transition is devastating, because Guardiola now has so many players in place to attack. If the five-second timeframe is exceeded, Guardiola's teams revert to a conventional shape, but only so they can begin pressing again.

When Douglas Costa arrived at Bayern, his coach asked him: 'Are you ready to learn how to play football?'

Guardiola's teams are well known for their intensity, something lacking from City's current set-up

It is exhausting work but, with the right personnel, has the potential to make consistent champions of City. Nobody doubts the talent at the club; merely its application.

Guardiola is not about to tell Sergio Aguero how to score goals, no more than he coached Messi on finishing.

Victor Valdes revealed that, at Barcelona, the manager lived by three rules. The first was to have the ball, the second was not to lose it in a compromising position. 'The third aspect is pressure in the rivals' half,' Valdes explained. 'We must bite, be very intense. Each player has a zone in which they should apply pressure and we should all help each other. You can't lose concentration, ever.'

When Sir Alex Ferguson wrote the foreword for Guillem Balague's biography of Guardiola, it was interesting that he, too, singled out what some would regard as his subject's most earthbound objective.

Jurgen Klopp has shown this season that high-intensity pressing does not always get results in England

'Guardiola has taken certain areas to another level, such as pressing the ball,' he wrote. 'Barcelona's disciplined style of play and work ethic has become a trademark of all his teams.'

That athleticism is present in the forward play, too. Guardiola does not talk of his players dribbling a ball, but running with it.

He is very sure of these principles. On the day Douglas Costa arrived at Bayern Munich from Shakhtar Donetsk, his new coach asked him: 'Are you ready to open your mind and learn how to play football?'

Clearly, Manchester City can play football, but not as Barcelona or Bayern Munich do. Those teams would not be residing in third place in the Premier League, a point behind Leicester, right now. We would not be echoing familiar concerns about work-rate, particularly that of Yaya Toure, if Guardiola was in charge.

For Manchester City's rivals, the fear is that Guardiola's philosophy and Sheik Mansour's resources together make an irresistible combination.

If Guardiola decides he does not possess the players capable of implementing his strategy, his new employers have the funds to rebuild in one summer.

If City succeed in attracting the necessary personnel, Guardiola can eradicate their crucial weaknesses in a matter of months.

It is just as well he continues to see three years as sufficient at any club. Guardiola's ideology and Manchester City's financial power are the stuff of which dynasties are made.

There will be sympathy for the man he replaces — particularly if City do wear down Arsenal and win the league — but the biggest mystery is why Manuel Pellegrini has not identified the obvious flaws in his team, and fixed them. It should not take Guardiola to solve City's problems.

Unlike the Liverpool boss, however, Guardiola would have a full pre-season to work with his new players

Of course, as Jurgen Klopp has found at Liverpool, a new high-energy strategy is not without complications. Klopp's gegenpressing tactic demands an extra 10-15 high-intensity runs per game from all outfield players, bar the central defenders. This explains the spate of hamstring injuries currently affecting Liverpool.

Yet Borussia Dortmund did not have this issue, and neither did Barcelona or Bayern Munich. It is the shift in style mid-season that has caused Liverpool pain; the additional, explosive workload, coupled with fixture congestion, has produced a predictable run of bad luck.

It is hard to believe that Klopp is genuinely surprised by this; as no other coach seems to be.

It will be different for Liverpool next season, as it will be different for Manchester City when Guardiola introduces his blueprint with the whole pre-season to focus on it. Conditioning work will give way to small-sided, fast-moving practice matches involving intense sprints of the type then replicated in matches.

Guardiola has tasted huge levels of success already in his career, and could continue that at City

Under Manuel Pellegrini City have been easy to beat - under Guardiola they could win three titles in a row

It will not take long to affect transformation. Toure, and a few others, will get with the programme or be marginalised. New arrivals will deliver what the new coach demands. And Manchester City will present considerably more of a challenge than Bournemouth.

That, right now, they do not, is the reason why Guardiola's arrival has become nothing less than essential; and why City's rivals have every reason to be fearful.

Three titles in three years, and then adios amigos? It is certainly not unthinkable.

Aside from the unfolding chaos at clubs such as Aston Villa, another reason to be sceptical around football's enthusiastic embrace of pure analytics is the number of times an individual, or a team, bucks all expectations.

Take Odion Ighalo of Watford, now emerging as a potential target for Arsenal and Manchester United. In the summer, Watford received an excellent offer in the region of £10million for him from Chinese club Hebei China Fortune.

Ighalo wasn't sure. He had come to Watford to realise a dream of playing in the Premier League. He had broken into Nigeria's team here.

Odion Ighalo, who almost left Watford this summer, is evidence that football is not an exact science

The club sat him down and patiently explained his prospects for the season. He wouldn't get many games. Troy Deeney would be the starting striker. This was a good offer. They would be willing to take it. He should take it, too. Ighalo agonised some more, and stayed.

He did not start in the first match, at Everton, but came on and scored. He hasn't looked back since. Ighalo has 14 goals this season and Watford are delighted — but a little nonplussed, too.

Like Jamie Vardy at Leicester, his success has come unpredicted, out of left field. And that's why the numbers don't always add up. Football isn't an exact science. Never was, never will be.

And while we're at it...

We don't need to deal with Chris Gayle again. It is obvious that his attempt to make a pass at Channel 10 reporter Mel McLaughlin, while live on air during a Big Bash game, was the very opposite of 'smooth' — the first description of the incident on the network's Twitter feed.

Behaviour that makes a female, indeed any employee, uncomfortable in her workplace is wholly crass and beneath contempt.

It is interesting, however, to see who also feels empowered to cry sexism these days. David Barham, 10's head of sport, said the company was deeply offended by Gayle's behaviour and would be seeking an apology.

Chris Gayle's attempt to make a pass at Mel McLaughlin was anything but smooth, but is not so unusual

He didn't add whether 10 would discontinue its penchant for focusing on a specific, rather lovely, demographic in the crowd, or disproportionately putting members of that demographic in front of camera on its sports programmes.

For, while not doubting for a moment the professional excellence of McLaughlin and her contemporaries, knowledge of the subject is only one of the boxes that needs to be ticked for the majority of women in sports broadcasting.

When The Guardian sent Hadley Freeman, fashion writer and columnist, to cover the 2014 World Cup, it did not take her long to notice the trend.

'Occasionally, I'd spot another woman at a team training camp, and they were always — always — a glammed-up TV reporter, all prettified in high heels and heavy make-up, while all around them were slobby male newspaper reporters,' she relayed.

So let's not pretend McLaughlin's workplace was one of high-ideal equal opportunities, until sullied by Gayle's nightclub sleaze. Those two worlds? They're not so different.

In their last league game, against Birmingham, Brentford were awarded a free-kick roughly 30 yards from goal. Birmingham lined up their wall.

Then Brentford lined up their wall, in front of the Birmingham wall. Then Brentford lined up a third wall, in front of their wall, in front of the Birmingham wall.

Brentford have a specialist free-kick coach, you see. A right clever dick, too, by the sounds of it.

Brentford have a specialist free-kick coach, but what matters most is still the man taking the kick

Anyway, when it came to the moment for this technical masterpiece to be delivered, the first wall scattered, the second wall backed into Birmingham's wall — and Alan Judge curled a tame shot a yard wide of the right-hand post.

It turns out the wall isn't as important as the kicker. No amount of planning can compensate for a taker who can't hit the target. Who would have thought it?

Cricket kid's 1,000 is not so grand after all

Pranav Dhanawade is clearly a talented young batsman with a lot of stamina. Even so, we should not pretend that his 1,009 not out for KC Gandhi English School against Arya Gurukul has the rigours of a genuine record.

For a start, there are concerns about the accuracy of the scoring, although an odd four runs here or there in such a mighty innings is not going to make a great difference. The pitch was small, so boundary hits were easier, although this can also happen in school games.

Most troubling, though, was the quality of the opposition. This was supposed to be a match for under 16s, but the headmaster of Arya Gurukul would not let the first team out due to exams.

The school instead sent its under 14 team, although some reports put the ages as low as 11. Certainly, the school's cricket coach, Yogesh Jagtap, said many of the participants were involved in their first competitive match. Whether they will play a second is the question.

Pranav Dhanawade is held aloft, but we should not pretend that his 1,009 not out is a genuine record

One of the reasons that Indian cricket maintains a fine tradition of patient Test batsmen is the encouragement schools players receive to play long innings.

When Cheteshwar Pujara made 206 against England in Ahmedabad in 2012, it transpired his eight hours and 33 minutes at the crease was a relatively short shift.

He had made his first triple hundred at the age of 12 in an under 14 game. Even so, there are limits. Knowing KC Gandhi's opponents were underage and inexperienced — and had already been bowled out for 31 — a declaration at 1,465 for three was unnecessary.