He is a fine player, and I think a lot of rational people can see that. But one piss poor (team) performance v Lyon and he is suddenly shit. Such are the mard arsed mood swings on blue doom
IMO he is a good player in the wrong team. He is clever, good on the ball and good in the air. But Fernandinho at his peak has been absolutely crucial to our success over the years. I’d argue that right now we miss him at his best over any other player of the last decade.
Pre Pep he played alongside Yaya and allowed Yaya to be as lazy and as petulant as he wanted off the ball whilst he did the graft of 2 players. By that I mean covering the ground of 2 players, winning the ball back for us with interceptions & tackles that his speed and agility allowed him to make whilst Yaya was invariably nowhere near the play.
Ferna also often started our attacks by wriggling away from challenges and playing a nicely weighted forward pass. Rodri has the latter but that’s pretty much it. He can’t get away from challenges to make a better angle for a pass. Yes, Rodri is playing in front of a back 4 that has probably been the worst we’ve had for a long time but that’s simply not the problem. We want to play with 2 free 8’s like we did with Silva & KDB but we can’t because Rodri doesn’t have the pace to play at the base of midfield on his own. KDB has often played deeper this year or in other games Gundo has come in to play near Rodri. Takes so much away from the attack and even then we don’t win the ball back like we used to.
We need to replace Fernandinho. Rodri would be a good back up option for the squad for certain games.