Pep Guardiola says things are “going wrong… in many, many details” for Manchester City, and perhaps nothing sums that up better than Rodri receiving two yellow cards inside 58 seconds at Bodo/Glymt on Tuesday.
City found themselves floundering at 3-0 down after quickfire first-half goals by Kasper Hogh following two defensive errors, as well as a fine strike by Jans Petter Hauge in the second half after Rodri had lost possession and could not win it back.
Rayan Cherki, City’s brightest attacking threat, then offered some hope but, soon after, Rodri’s two yellows sealed their fate.
The television cameras were still rolling replays of Cherki’s goal when the Spain international was exposed in the middle of the pitch and left with no option but to take a yellow card for halting a counter-attack. It typifies how quickly City’s possession is turning into dangerous counter-attacks against them at the moment, as it did in the Manchester derby on Saturday.
Despite having just got themselves back into the game, City were suddenly wide open, with nobody other than Rodri and the centre-backs around to do anything about it.
Hakon Evjen, like many of his team-mates before and after, was eyeing up a run at City’s inexperienced defence when Rodri stepped across him to cynically bring him down, making no attempt to play the ball.
This was a function of how City set up as they chased the game. From kick-off, City had positioned Rico Lewis deep alongside Rodri in midfield, or at least rotated somebody else in if Lewis pushed up, but in need of a response to Bodo’s lead there was less of an onus on keeping somebody else in that deeper role. It effectively left the Spaniard as the only shield in front of the defence.
That in itself is problematic because the 2024 Ballon d’Or winner still looks rusty following his return from injury, a point underlined here and in the bitterly disappointing derby defeat at the weekend.
That should not be a surprise.
“I said to Rodri, and maybe he struggled to understand,” Guardiola told reporters in October, “it’s not about six months or seven months (after the injury). ‘Ah, eight months I’ll play and be the Rodri of before.’ No.
“Rodri will be good at the World Cup with Spain. In the World Cup it will be the best Rodri and next season will be the best Rodri. This season will be how we handle it, step by step.”
That said, given Guardiola expected a slow recovery, it cannot be wise to expect Rodri to be the player he was before the injury. Back then, you could imagine Rodri winning the ball back more easily in these kinds of situations.
Rodri struggled to offer protection to City’s defence on Tuesday (Martin Ole Wold/Getty Images)
You could also imagine that he may not be quite as exposed by his team-mates pre-injury. Of course, part of what makes Rodri so good is his ability to win possession back when exposed and he did that even when City were at their very best, but over the past 12 or 13 months Guardiola’s team have been even more open than they were in 2019-20, Rodri’s difficult first season.
The good news is that most of those examples came in the middle of last season, a terrible run of three months that seems to have been consigned to the past, although on Tuesday night Guardiola did draw a comparison to that period by saying that his side were similarly “fragile”.
The very fact that Rodri was in a position to earn a very similar second yellow card so soon after the first tells the story of how City are giving the ball away easily and are not well placed to win it back at the moment.
Phil Foden, who has not played well over recent weeks, was tackled on the left wing and, at that point, City only had Rodri and their two centre-backs — aged 21 and 20 — behind the ball. There is a point to be made about simply not losing the ball when your opponents are high — for example, when receiving the ball from the goalkeeper in the build-up — and while that is one error, City’s risky set-up as they chased the game was also asking for trouble and did see them suffer several times.
Evjen, who won the ball back, passed inside to Hogh, who played it first time down the Bodo right to set Ole Blomberg running in behind Rodri, who ran across the back of the Norwegian and brought him down.
After the defeat at Manchester United, Guardiola lamented that his side were not attacking with any intention, merely recycling the ball slowly.
He said that was not the case against Bodo, instead highlighting how well the home side close off spaces in the middle and force teams wide, which increases the importance of wingers — and City are missing Jeremy Doku and Savinho with injury, while Antoine Semenyo is not registered to play in Europe yet.
Even so, most of City’s good work this season has been with ‘wide’ players pushed inside into the areas behind Erling Haaland.
And on Tuesday, as has been the case several times recently, of Haaland and the assembled players behind him, only Cherki looked likely to make something happen and he was always trying to get on the ball.
Foden really struggled to make an impact at Old Trafford and it was the same again on Tuesday, while Tijjani Reijnders, who had started to contribute goals at the back end of last year, has returned to his limited early-season performances.
Guardiola said a week ago that Haaland is “exhausted”, and the liveliest he has looked in recent weeks was at St James’ Park last Tuesday after City had a goal controversially ruled out, which seemed to spark him into life.
Since then he has looked off the pace, struggling to win his duels and make a meaningful contribution. It all adds up to an uninspired attack that is suddenly struggling to score goals. With City pushing more bodies up the pitch, but with their chief attacking weapons not playing well, it puts a huge strain on Rodri, himself not at his best, when the ball is turned over as he tries to protect a young backline, with Max Alleyne struggling in the past two games.
In that regard it is probably no surprise that so many things are going wrong at present.