Manchester City may have entered the season as the favorites to win a fifth successive Premier League title, but the reckoning on their chances of extending their winning streak is changing considerably now that Rodri is expected to miss much of the campaign with a knee injury.
Rodri came off in the first half of City’s 2-2 draw with Arsenal on Sunday with the injury, leaving a big hole in City’s midfield in the process. The Spain international has been the most important player during the team’s recent run of dominance, averaging more than 50 games a season since moving to England in 2019. City have lost just 11 percent of the games he has played in, leaving manager Pep Guardiola. with a tactical conundrum that could be unlike any other he has faced in his eight-year spell at the club.
Here’s a look at Guardiola’s options as he begins to plan for a season without Rodri.
Mateo Kovacic
The most obvious answer to the question of who could now enter City’s line-up is Mateo Kovacic, who replaced Rodri against Arsenal and has already started most of the team’s games this season while Guardiola has been given extra rest after the Euros. Kovacic has played alongside Ilkay Gundogan and Rico Lewis this season in City’s midfield, a plan that has worked well so far.
In his 69-minute appearance against Arsenal on Sunday, Kovacic had 92 touches and 86 passes – behind only defenders Ruben Dias, Kyle Walker and Manuel Akanji – boasting a passing accuracy of 95.3%, as well as a 96.6% completion rate in the attack. third Those numbers are actually better than his impressive performances so far this season – he’s averaging 73 touches per game, as well as a passing accuracy of 95.2 percent. He is in the Premier League’s top five for touches by a defensive midfielder, and second only to Akanji for passing accuracy by players who have played more than 300 minutes.
Although goals are not necessarily a crucial part of his game, he has already had one this season and has created seven chances so far in league play.
Someone else
With or without Rodri’s injury, Kovacic is likely to play plenty of minutes for City this season as the team prepares for another 50-plus game season between domestic competition, an expanded UEFA Champions League and an even bigger Club World Cup in the summer. That poses a different question for Guardiola, who prefers to rotate as much as he can to combat fixture congestion – who could play the minutes originally earmarked for Kovacic?
Gundogan and Lewis are natural contenders if Guardiola chooses to change the cadence of his rotation patterns in Rodri’s absence, but he may have to call on others during the season. John Stones could benefit from the newly available playing time, despite making his only start of the season at centre-back. The 30-year-old has made two substitute appearances as a defensive midfielder, including a 12-minute cameo against Arsenal in which he scored the equaliser, but how much Guardiola plans to call on him is a big question mark. Someone like Matheus Nunes could also be in the mix, but he’s only played 20 minutes so far in the league this season.
Is Rodri replaceable?
The coming months for Guardiola will be an exercise in answering an unenviable question – how do you replace the irreplaceable? Guardiola’s City team is like a gathering of the best of the best in every position, and yet the undisputed leader of that pack was Rodri. Rare were the days they lost with him in the lineup, and even rarer were the days he was unavailable. He played 260 times for the team in five years, a constant during an era of success that felt inevitable for City.
Rodri is more than a faithful defensive midfielder, though, which makes him even harder to replace. His ability to get involved in attack is unrivaled for players in his position, offering a bit of everything in a way that perfectly suits Guardiola’s style of play. It may not actually be possible to replace Rodri specifically because he is a one-of-a-kind player. Instead, Guardiola may have to maximize the talents of his players rather than asking them to imitate Rodri, which could force him to get creative. The good news for him is that he has a decent record in this category – City teams survived injuries to Kevin de Bruyne and Erling Haaland last season. Reproducing the same without Rodri, however, could be a very different story.
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