Bayern Munich's Pep Guardiola loses possession of winning formula #CarryGobySeanKellz #FutureGroupNG via @myentertain9jar

IN just 10.9 seconds, Pep Guardiola had had £315million of talent unleashed upon him.

Pep Guardiola's tactics failed as Bayern Munich crashed out of the Champions League[REUTERS]

Shell-shocked? The Bayern Munich manager must have wondered quite how long he had spent on his sabbatical from football.

Gareth Bale, £85m, picked up a loose ball on the edge of his own area. Angel Di Maria, £34m, shipped it on to Karim Benzema, £30m, who fed the ball onto Bale for a second time - another £85m...kerching. The former Tottenham player outpaced Jerome Boateng and could have gone on to score himself.

But why not bring in another £81m-worth of talent in the shape of Cristiano Ronaldo and finish things off properly less than 11 seconds after Bayern Munich had lost possession at the other end of the field?

It made it 3-0 to Real Madrid after 34 game-changing minutes in the Allianz Arena.

That is too short a time over which to decide to rip up an entire blueprint - especially one that has been so successful since Guardiola first graduated to front-line management in 2008.

But it is also a timely reminder that football continually evolves, and perhaps if Guardiola wants to maintain his status as one of the game's most astute coaches, he needs to reinvent himself.

Real Madrid's 5-0 aggregate win was achieved with less than 30 per cent of possession over the two legs.

Overall, throughout the knockout stages, they have managed just 47 per cent of the ball in a run that also included clashes with Schalke and Borussia Dortmund.

Bayern were unable to contain Cristiano Ronaldo [GETTY]

Possession is a relative statistic and having it just for the sake of it is pointless

Xabi Alonso

Intriguingly, their opponents in Lisbon on May 24 have also had less than half of the play on their own run to the final.

And while Guardiola took his well-earned break from management, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund progressed through to last year's final with the possession stats against them.

Of course, before turning his back on the game Guardiola had also lost his last Champions League semi-final - a 2-3 aggregate defeat to Chelsea in 2012 in which Roberto Di Matteo's side had to make the most of just 19 per cent possession over the two legs.

An aberration, Guardiola must have thought as he disappeared into the sunset having been denied a showpiece send-off.

But he has instead returned to the dawn of the counter-attackers.

The wider football world was served notice of Real Madrid's happiness to rely on the tactic in the Copa del Rey final earlier this month.

None other than Guardiola's former Barcelona charges were the mesmerised victims after Bale did not so much hit them on the counter as climb over the counter, weave around the bar stools and jump back the right side of the bar to finish so spectacularly.

Few can turn play round in such devastating fashion as Real Madrid, but both Atletico and Chelsea have also achieved success in Europe this season in a similar manner of sitting back and hitting on the break.

Lionel Messi gave Guardiola's Barcelona side the cutting edge [GETTY]

Jose Mourinho has even extended the tactic into his domestic campaign, "parking the bus" against Liverpool but using it to launch out-riders to open up the title run-in once again.

It may not win plaudits, but it does win football games.

During Guardiola's reign at Barcelona, his team reached and played in four successive Champions League finals while averaging 69.8 per cent possession in games. Tika-taka football at its much-celebrated finest.

And it was effective - not least because a large share of that play was enjoyed by a certain Lionel Messi.

But as Munich's failure showed on Tuesday, the possession is useless unless you have somebody as special as the Argentina icon to use it.

If his reckless final-wrecking yellow card was anything to go by, Xabi Alonso was scarcely at his philosophical best this week, but he did manage to hit Guardiola's conundrum squarely on the head.

"Possession is a relative statistic and having it just for the sake of it is pointless," he said. "You have to know how to interpret the game and how to harm them."

And if Guardiola is to be spoken about in the same hushed terms as such a multi-seasoned veteran as Sir Alex Ferguson as one of the game's greatest coaches, he needs to work that out again from scratch.