Rodri: I have to talk to the club and the coach… playing 60-something games is not healthy

When John Stones talks about players with a 360 degree vision of the game, Rodri is one of the guys he is talking about.

The Spanish midfield maestro knows exactly what is going on around him on the pitch — and spending some time with him on Manchester City’s pre-season tour of Japan and Korea it seems that he knows exactly what is going on around him everywhere else, too.

He was arguably Manchester City’s best player last season, excelling at every aspect of his game, from taking the ball off Ederson with two opponents closing him down to thwarting counter-attacks with intelligent tackles and providing a goal threat, most notably with the winning goal in the Champions League final.

It may well be that he was so important to the team that Pep Guardiola could simply not afford to leave him on the bench for fear that their quest for the treble fell apart, no matter how much he felt he had to.

As a result the 27-year-old played more games than anybody else at City, even goalkeeper Ederson, and while he gives the sense that he was more than happy to play such a big part of a remarkable season, he knows that it is not sustainable.

“I don’t remember exactly the games I played but I think I have to have a talk with the club and with the coach because starting 57, 59 games and playing 60-something in general is not healthy,” he says. “You can do it one season but two or three in a row it could be worse for the team in the sense that the physicality can drop, so we have to watch out for these kinds of things and, for sure, with my people we have already spoken and said it cannot be like this.

“On the other hand, last year I had the feeling that we were fighting for everything so I had to push my body to the limit — that’s why sometimes I feel like this at the end of the season, but for me it was great.”

Rodri was man of the match as Spain won the UEFA Nations League eight days after also being named man of the match in Istanbul, and he took the opportunity afterwards to highlight the amount of games that modern players are expected to play in a season.

It is something that Guardiola has raised continuously, too, often saying that the authorities are “killing the players”, and he has specifically addressed Rodri’s workload, stating in January that “Rodri cannot sleep, he has to have the feeling there is someone close to him to do it,” when discussing the urgent need for Kalvin Phillips to provide an alternative option in midfield.

Rodri acknowledges that Guardiola “understands a lot and gives us everything he can” in terms of rest and says that City have “maybe the best medical team I have seen, not only in the sense of avoiding injuries but also the ability to play lots of games in good shape and the physicality of the team almost all the season is high.”

“If you see the minutes on paper I played seven, eight, nine games more than the second player but it’s not a problem,” he adds. “The important thing for me is that they know the situation and they know for next season we have to watch out for this.

“Now I’m young, but maybe when I’m 30 or 31 I cannot do these kind of things so I have to watch the body, because 60 games is not the best thing for a player. But also the seasons are like this — they are even longer every year — we have to adapt to this.”

It is certainly easy to look back now and believe it was all worth it. Following the FA Cup final at Wembley he danced on the pitch as he and his team-mates sang “Gundo’s on fire, your defence is terrified” after Ilkay Gundogan scored twice to see off United, and a week later it was Rodri who was on fire as the City players bounced around the Ataturk dressing room — and everywhere else from Ibiza to Manchester for the next few days.

“Five thousand!” he says with a big smile when asked how many times he has watched his winning goal back.

“In all the languages, in Spanish, in English, in Italian, in German, everything.

“When I go on holidays now they sing me the song, so life has changed a bit for me in this sense, but I keep calm like I always have done.

“I think nowadays it’s difficult to process everything, I would love to stop for a few months to analyse what happened because everything went very fast after the final of the Champions League, because I played with my national team and we won our first trophy for lots of years so there was lots of good feelings together.

“With MVPs in the finals, important goals, everything was together. To be honest I didn’t have much time, but for sure what I can say is that I am so proud of that and this year maybe I have more time to… of course I have to focus on the season but sometimes I watch videos about what happened and I smile.

“What we achieved collectively I am sometimes more happy for the club and my team-mates when I see them celebrating.”

After so many re-runs of the goal it is no surprise that he has a crystal clear memory of how it came about.

“I remember it was one of the tiny moments in the game when (Inter) disorganised a little bit,” he explains. “I remember Manu (Akanji) going with the ball and they made a mistake, the centre-back jumped and he generated space for Bernardo (Silva) and then Bernardo got to the byline and he just passed the ball, a deflection, and all the players were going to defend the goal, nobody covering the area.

“At that moment I think I had three seconds to decide what I was going to do with the ball. Normally my natural instinct is to shoot strong and in that moment I wanted to go ‘BAM! I don’t care’. But on the other hand I thought it’s the only shot I’m going to have in all the game — and I saw seven, eight, nine players defending the goal — so I thought if I shoot strong maybe they deflect it or it’s a corner, so I tried to think of putting curl on it — and it was in.

“You might think I had time but in that moment I didn’t have the feeling I had much time; the ball just came to me and in one, two, three seconds you have to decide what to do, but it was very special. Honestly I just focused myself on what to do with the ball, where I wanted to put it and when it was in there was that explosion.”

That goal probably swung the man of the match vote in his favour; he said his performance had been “shit” afterwards, and he now reveals that Guardiola demanded much more from him at half-time, too.

“I was not happy with my performance at that moment because in the finals your team needs the best of you, so I was like, ‘Rodri, you have to do better’, it was self criticism, also the coach in that moment was very direct to me, he said, ‘You have to make a step forward’.

“In these moments you have to be strong mentally to accept this criticism when the team is suffering or when you aren’t in the best moments, and I think we overcame this situation pretty well.”

Rodri should know all about that after a difficult first season at City. Guardiola knew he had got his hands on a fantastic player when the Spaniard arrived for £60million from Atletico Madrid in 2019, but also knew he would need time to settle in and correct some issues in his game.

Due to an injury to Aymeric Laporte, though, Fernandinho was moved to centre-back and Rodri filled the gap in midfield. Not only was he playing more than expected, but the players ahead of him struggled to sustain attacks and counter-press as well as they had done in previous seasons, and so the relative flaws in the new boy’s game were highlighted as opponents made hay on the counter-attack.

It was the one season, apart from Guardiola’s first, when City did not win the title and there were doubts about whether Rodri had what it takes to replace fan-favourite Fernandinho, who had already played the role with distinction for seven years by that point.

Looking back now, though, it does not seem like he ever shared those concerns.

“Honestly I didn’t expect my first year to be my best season,” he says. “I changed club, I changed the culture of football, a new league, everything was new.

“I didn’t expect my best season, even though I thought it was a good season for me, to grow, because I know in football that when you don’t achieve it is not enough, but until you achieve you have to grow and I tried to grow to raise the levels and that was happening for me in that moment.

“From there I kept going and kept going and then the trophies and good moments came. I was happy about all my process at City — I know that people sometimes lose their patience, they don’t know that football has a process but I do understand that as a player, and I was happy with that.”

City were something of a slow burner themselves last season, with Jack Grealish admitting that even in March he wondered whether they would win a single trophy, let alone three, and that is something Rodri recognises, too.

“I think the best version of City last season came in the last months, after everything we had with the World Cup and all the games, with Arsenal just playing one tournament and us involved in three or four,” he adds. “This talks about the mentality and also the physicality because I can tell you in that moment that I was very, very, very tired. Maybe the head is stronger than the body because we made a step forward and I think that’s what the top players do.”

Before Guardiola had even left the stadium in Istanbul he had said that City’s challenge for this season is to not allow the levels to drop now that the Champions League is in the bag, and he did not waste a second when the players joined up against in July.

What next for City then, as they prepare to kick off the new season — and their quest to win an unprecedented four league titles in a row — against Burnley on Friday night?

“I have the feeling the coaches started from the very first day, he doesn’t want us to get confused,” Rodri says. “What we did was incredible but, on the other hand, the other teams are raising the level and I think you saw last season with most of the times we dropped points, people were like, ‘Oh, can City do it…?’. So we can’t get confused, we have to keep going and believe in ourselves and we have to start from now — we have to prepare and it is going to be a tough season.”

He can spot that one a mile off.