Like a few hundred million others I watched the Champion's League final last night between Chelsea and Man City.

I always prefer it if the final is between teams from two different countries. But last night was a chance to see some real cat-and-mouse tactics from two teams who knew each other well.

Man City were the overwhelming favourites having absolutely dominated the Premier League this season. In fact their victory was seen as so certain that the main article in my newspaper in the morning was “Leonardo, Einstein…Pep? The Genius of Guardiola”.

Fate and Football didn't see it that way.

City barely threatened Chelsea with only one shot on target all game. In fact, it looked to all the world like Chelsea's new manager, Thomas Tuchel had thoroughly outfoxed Guardiola.

My feeling though was more that Guardiola had outfoxed himself.

Despite Man City's dominance in the league, Chelsea had beaten them the last two times they played and it seemed to weigh heavily on Guardiola. It seemed to me that rather than picking his best team and formation, his tactics were designed primarily to surprise and fool Tuchel.

They certainly surprised the pundits, the City fans, and apparently his players too.

In essence, he overthought the whole thing when a much simpler plan of playing his best team in their preferred formation would have worked much better.

(At least that's my view. In truth, my stature as a football coach is ant-like compared to Guardiola. But bear with me for the purposes of this analogy!)

Overthinking is a trap many of us fall into with marketing and something I know all too well myself.

You end up worrying so much about how people will react, going round in circles, procrastinating umming and ahhhing.

Then in the end, in order to try to cover all the different shades of grey you dreamt up, you create something either so complicated or so middle-of-the-road that it just doesn't have much impact at all.

I've realised over the years that I need to take a step back when something is taking me a long time. Take a look and if what I'm working on feels complicated it's probably not going to work.

Far better to go right back to first principles and do something simple.

Much more often than not it's the right approach.