I realised I was in trouble when Ruben Dias walked past me.Manchester City’s end-of-season parties are pretty major operations attended by hundreds of people and, generally speaking, the first-team players and staff are given a completely separate area, away from the ‘regular’ employees.So when my friend asked me, last minute, if I wanted to go to the party held the day after City had clinched the 2021-22 title in remarkable fashion, scoring three goals in six minutes to come from two goals down against Aston Villa, I thought, ‘Why not?’The problem was that the friend in this case was Nedum Onuoha, the former City player who is still very involved with the club, and we were ushered straight upstairs to the area where the players and coaches were. Immediately I knew I shouldn’t be there.Dias walked past me and I squeezed my way through the coaches and physios that have become recognisable as the background cast over the past decade. At the training ground, the players and staff have their own building and even City employees from, say, the marketing team or the commercial department, are kept at arm’s length. Even the club’s academy have somewhat restricted access, so if a journalist got into that first-team building uninvited there would be hell to pay.So as I found myself squeezed between the coaches, players and wives and girlfriends, I looked for safety. That morning, I had done a television appearance with Shay Given, so I was delighted to head in that direction and keep a low profile on the sofa with his family.Unfortunately, leaning against the back of that sofa were Kevin De Bruyne and Pep Guardiola, who were chatting with other members of the manager’s family.I have no idea who made the call, but it was not long before a friendly security guard, who I’ve known for years, came over and asked what the hell I was doing there, and guided me out of a back exit without any fuss.Guardiola and his staff celebrate City’s title win in 2021-22 (OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images)That is one of about five times that I saw Guardiola close up away from press conferences and general media areas during his 10 years at City. The day before that, after the chaos of the Villa game, I had stopped him to shake his hand before he entered the press conference. It was a remarkable final day and one that rivalled what it must have been like at the Etihad when Sergio Aguero scored against Queens Park Rangers.During that ‘presser’, I put it to him that Jurgen Klopp had said that, regardless of the accusations around City’s 115 or more charges, nobody could have done what Guardiola has done, and he started tearing up. Only in the last few days has it become clear that what gets to him most is praise from peers and how fans feel about him.A year after that, as he made his way out of the press auditorium in Istanbul, after City had won the Champions League, I said ‘congratulations’ as he walked past. He turned, looked up and extended his hand.During my paternity leave in the second half of last year, I wondered whether I should give Guardiola a call and have a chat, one man to another, but it was spelled out to me by somebody who used to work at City that that would be a truly terrible idea. It is not the done thing.On Friday, after the announcement of his departure, he spent some time with journalists after his final pre-match press conference, where he gave a little speech and held a few one-on-one conversations. He teared up during one of them, and looked slightly bemused when given golfing advice on how to add 30 yards to his drive, and not just because he could not understand the accent.He was in raconteur mode there, retelling a story of how Diego Maradona kicked a ball over to journalists at the 1986 World Cup, knowing they would pick it up rather than control it, because they — and by implication us — have no idea what to do with a football.I do have a suspicion, especially given his incredibly relaxed and welcoming demeanour over the past few months, that Guardiola might have enjoyed, or at least tolerated, a chat beyond the press conferences, or at least an extra 10 minutes at the end of those embargoed sections.Guardiola on the golf course in 2018 (Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images)There have been some other close-up encounters down the years. He once played for about 10 minutes in the traditional end-of-season games between journalists and City’s media staff at the Etihad just after they won the title with 100 points in 2018. It was not such a close-up encounter, actually, because he was in an embarrassing amount of space at all times. I was playing centre-back and he suddenly got the ball about 25 yards out, and I was the nearest one to him, but I knew that I was so far away I wouldn’t have been able to make a difference. Even so, he looked around for a pass and did not have any team-mates in a position to do the kind of damage that he would have expected.It was around then that I wrote an article about Guardiola’s first season in management, a year at Barcelona B, and an old friend of his kindly set up a short interview after a press conference where I could ask him a few questions specifically about that time. He explained on Friday that he decided during his Barcelona days not to give one-on-one interviews with journalists covering his clubs, so that must have been a very rare event.