Good pressure for Alvarez's goal and a few nice passes.
Unfortunately, his game still looks too littered with errors - a wayward pass out of play, or getting easily muscled off the ball, or just being slightly too slow to react.
But it was a pre-season friendly, and he's hardly played for a year, so I think we need to be patient and keep trying to get him minutes during this pre-season to see how it goes and how much he can improve.
Rodri is so good that any other specialist CDM we could employ would be a big drop-off. The few big players in world football that might come close to Rodri wouldn't take the cut in playing time that being his understudy would entail. In a way it's a nice problem to have, but it does leave us very reliant on Rodri.
There is a player in there with Phillips but he's got to take his chances when they come, because nothing he's shown so far suggests Pep would trust him in a meaningful competitive match if he had another viable option.