So Rodri has become indispensable in the Manchester City that won the Champions League

In the era of star power at all costs, of the attention inevitably placed on forwards and attacking midfielders, the Champions League final one of Pep Guardiola’s loyalists solved it, a footballer who is always there, hidden in plain sight. In 2021, to the general surprise, Rodrigo Hernandez Cascantefor all more simply Rodrigo or Rodri, had remained seated on the bench: the Catalan coach had chosen a different setup, with Gündogan in charge. A decision strongly criticized in hindsight and which perhaps also served the genius of Santpedor to understand that there can be no Manchester City without Rodri.

The signing on the final in Istanbul is not the first of a certain level: already decisive a year ago, in the turbulent afternoon that handed the Premier League to the Citizens in a final not recommended for the faint of heart, Rodri repeated himself this year, opening the scoring in the quarter-final first leg against Bayern Munich before putting the icing on Saturday night. The former Atletico Madrid is the supreme balancer of a team thought out down to the smallest detail: with Guardiola’s new setup, there’s no need to see him drop between the centre-backs to start play, he who can also play defender if necessary, and is therefore freer to offer himself in the offensive midfield, a sort of Busquets 2.0.

And yet, due to his tendency to often be the only bulwark in a midfield that makes fluidity and attacking mentality its strong point, the other immediate comparison is with Casemiro, the man who allowed Real Madrid to establish his winning cycle, protecting the backs of Modric and Kroos, enduring and hiding their defensive deficiencies. Just like the Brazilian, Rodri found a decisive goal in a Champions League final against an Italian: “Casemiro di Guardiola” is the prototype of the modern footballer, physically impressive, capable of holding up speed even against faster opponents, strong of a mentality that draws heavily from a historically rough nursery like that of Atletico Madrid and which has known how to be contaminated by Guardiola’s constantly evolving football ideas. He isn’t afraid of physical confrontation but neither is he afraid of the ball, intended as an object to be held firmly between his feet: Rodri dictates the times and rhythms of the game, 70 million spent in a masterly way.

UEFA, well beyond the goal in the final, has decided to award him as the best player of the tournament, perfect closure of a season in which he took the field 56 times for a total of 4,478 minutes, in spite of the turnover and the coaches terrified of matches every three days: in the hours in which Rodri’s profiles are wasted based on his renunciation of social networks and on the sentences of brutal honesty uttered at the end of the game, even taking on excessive blame for a first half played below expectations, it seems instead appropriate to emphasize his having become indispensable for a coach who has always made the importance of the midfield and the management of the ball its raison d’etre. Guardiola’s continuous adjustments have led to the recovery of a quadrilateral concept in midfield dear to the Brazilian tradition, often linked to the double half-back to be placed alongside a double attacking midfielder: Stones and Rodri in charge, De Bruyne and Gündogan ahead. The desire to control the ball raised to the nth degree, the message that the midfield, as the term itself suggests, is at the center of everything. Not surprisingly, while the world was watching Haaland, Rodri popped up.