Thought he played well tonight against a team hell bent on just getting cheap fouls by cheating. Unlucky not to score.
Yep - but I think they were told to play it much quicker in the second which is our strength and should be the way we always play.I thought he played well in a 442 system that brings out the worst in the Rodri-Gundogan pairing.
Seeing the lineup before the match I thought "Perfect, Bernardo adding legs to those two in a three works", and then by half time it was clear Bernardo's average position was further up than Aguero's.
In the second half I thought Bernardo was more of a midfielder and things started working.
I agree with all of that. Too often he offers himself up to the centre half for a square pass instead of enabling them to play a ball to play through the first line of defence. I watched a re-run of the City QPR game during early lockdown and was reminded about how deep our midfield sat and how Lescott always had to give it to someone else to play the first pass and it was striking how slow we were compared to peak Guardiola. Rodri is sending us backwards. Gundogan always looks for pockets of space but Rodri means we place too much pressure on the front 5 to be creativeWorst player on the pitch tonight. Whilst he’s not solely to blame for their goal, it’s another example of his lack of pace costing us dearly, a more mobile player gets across, tracks the man instead of letting him waltz past him. But apparently we’re not allowed to just keep mentioning his iron boots every game so I’ll point out how poor his positional play in possession is.
First half he was the main reason why we could not build anything from the back, no matter who was in possession Rodri has an impressive knack of placing himself between the ball and an opposition player, rarely opening himself up for the progressive forward pass which means we go side to side along the defence with no penetration. On the occasions he does want the ball and makes himself available it’s usually when he’s dropped into centre back which serves no purpose.
Fernandinho is always on for the pass, he will position himself beyond the first press to receive the ball where we can start to make meaningful progress into the oppositions half, Rodri doesn’t do that and the first half in particular was one of the worst instances of that. Somewhat better second half but mainly because Bernardo and Gundogan dropped deeper then it completely opened up after we took the lead and they just threw everybody upfront.
Thought he played well tonight against a team hell bent on just getting cheap fouls by cheating. Unlucky not to score.