There are times when a football pitch can look very small and you start to wonder whether perhaps, in these days of hyper-fit, hyper-organised athletes, the playing area needs to be stretched, or a player or two per side removed. And there are other times when the pitch looks enormous, a giant patchwork of Rodri-shaped holes.
There is a danger when the absence of Rodri is so pressing, when everybody is so aware of Rodri not being there, that it feels like every pass in the final third would have been cut out by Rodri.
It could seem at times as though he was an enormous fire-blanket, stifling opposition attacks on both sides of the pitch simultaneously, but he wasn’t actually omnipresent. And yet equally it’s true that, if Rodri had been there, Newcastle probably wouldn’t have equalised in the way they did.
The second half had been something of a mess; there was one 30-second spell of the ball being hacked into the air one way and the other that wouldn’t have looked out of place 30 to 40 years ago. And then, entirely without warning, a gap opened up, the ball was slipped through by Joelinton and Anthony Gordon ran on to knock the ball wide of Ederson and tumble over him. It’s just not the sort of goal that City concede.
Kyle Walker was mysteriously five yards behind the City line, playing Gordon onside, but just as telling was the space in front of Manuel Akanji, exactly the sort of area that Rodri habitually patrols, quelling attacks as much by his presence as by more direct interventions.
A draw away at Newcastle is not by any means a terrible result for City. But it isn’t a win and that not only gives a quantum of hope to other sides near the top of the table, but extends one of the Premier League’s more remarkable statistics: since the first week of October 2022 when City beat Manchester United 6-3, which is to say, two years by the next time City play in the competition, the only side they have beaten in a league game without Rodri in the team is Luton.
Since the beginning of February 2023 – that is, 18 months ago – there have been only two ways to beat Manchester City: either Rodri was absent, or you had Scott McTominay in your side. It would be absurd to suggest City are dependent on any one player, a notion that runs entirely contrary to Pep Guardiola’s obsession with the coherence of the team, but equally Rodri, through his passing and, perhaps even more so, through has positioning, was often the creator of that cohesion.
He is not directly replaceable; no player of his level possibly could be. As Guardiola pointed out this week, when players are highly fancied for the Ballon d’Or, it tends to be because they offer something extremely unusual, something that others cannot easily replicate. All City can do is try to recreate something of his impact through an amalgam of other players.
In that respect, the decision to bring Ilkay Gündogan back from Barcelona a week before the transfer window closed looks extremely prescient, even if Gündogan, for now at least, looks notably less sharp than he did when he left; it may be some measure of readaptation is required, or it may simply be that he is nearly 34. But whatever problems City have covering for Rodri would have been far worse without the Germany international. There is, apparently, no prospect of Kalvin Phillips returning from his loan at Ipswich.
On Saturday, Gündogan operated to the left as the most advanced of the three central midfielders, with Mateo Kovacic in the Rodri role at the base and Rico Lewis as the balancing player to the right. All three finished with a pass completion rate over 90%, but not quite as high as the 93.4% Rodri had been averaging this season.
But it’s not just about ball retention, or tackles, interceptions or chance creation. Rodri is a master of influencing games in a way that statistics struggle to pick up, just by being in the right place, shaping the game around him by presence alone.
For five minutes or so after the equaliser, City were remarkably ragged. There was, just briefly, a moment when Newcastle threatened to overwhelm them. The arrival of Phil Foden for Gündogan, a more incisive presence higher up the pitch, quelled that, but the thought was that that sort of shapelessness just cannot happen when Rodri is around, no more than untidiness could happen on Mary Poppins’s watch.
Football is, at its heart, a chaotic game. Guardiola’s great project is to control it and, with the possible exception of Sergio Busquets, nobody has brought it to order in quite the same way as Rodri does.
There’s little chance of the issue of his absence going away any time soon.
