Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola revealed that his star midfielder Rodri admitted that he was in too much pain to play against Burnley on Saturday afternoon after aggravating his long-term knee injury.
The Spanish pacesetter at the base of midfield missed the vast majority of last season with a torn ACL. Guardiola has been at pains to gradually reintegrate the returning talisman, who has endured a stop-start opening to the new campaign. Heading into this weekend’s fixture, he had to listen to his body.
“Rodri yesterday in training said, ‘I’m not able to play. I have a lot of pain in my knee, I cannot play, I cannot play’,” the City boss revealed. “I said: ‘You cannot play, you don’t play. Another one is going to play.’”
Nico González lined up in front of City’s backline for a fairly routine 5–1 thumping of newly promoted opposition on Saturday, but the Spaniard—who Guardiola hastily christened ‘mini-Rodri’ last season—has struggled to fill the chasm created by his compatriot’s absence.
Man City’s Struggles Replacing Rodri
The issue with replacing Rodri is that, when at his best, he does so much more than any other holding midfielder in the world. Beyond breaking up play and funnelling the ball forward, Rodri is effectively the brain and beating heart of City.
“I try to give movement to the play, a dynamism, a rhythm,” is his explanation. “To connect to the players in front of you as soon as you can, to help the game ‘mature,’ to interpret it, take it where you want it to be.” Having a firm grip of those intangibles is precisely why he won the Ballon d’Or.
It took the cerebral midfielder at least a year of intense Guardiola tutelage to even begin to master the role. Nico has had a little over six months but the former Barcelona academy graduate deemed surplus to requirements in Catalonia is by no means guaranteed to ever reach those heights. Whether Rodri can even get back there remains to be seen.
The 29-year-old suffered a flareup of the same knee problem at this summer’s Club World Cup, which forced him to miss City’s Premier League opener away to Wolverhampton Wanderers. After coming off the bench in a 2–0 defeat to Tottenham Hotspur, Rodri played the full 90 minutes as City collapsed against Brighton & Hove Albion at the end of August, suffering his first Premier League defeat as a starter since February 2023.
The first year after returning from an ACL tear is rarely straightforward and the Spaniard’s attempts to reestablish some order isn’t aided by Guardiola’s increasing willingness to be more direct.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as ‘I Cannot’—Pep Guardiola Delivers Worrying Rodri Injury Update.
