To understand how Rodri, Anderson and someone like Bouaddi might come together, it is key to understand Maresca’s game model.<\/p>\n
As a disciple of positional play, he draws comparisons between his football and chess.<\/p>\n
“There are a lot of similarities,” Maresca said. “The most important is positional play and strategy.<\/p>\n
“For a coach, it’s important to have the mentality of a chess player: develop a plan, study counter-moves, choose the arrangement of the pieces.”<\/p>\n
Maresca’s strategy has largely been rooted in an on-the-ball shape that looks like a 3-2-2-3.<\/p>\n
One of Rodri’s most useful qualities in a Maresca side would be his ability to move between these predefined positions on the pitch.<\/p>\n
Throughout the World Cup, for example, we saw him drop into the backline when former City team-mate Aymeric Laporte pushed up with the ball.<\/p>\n
Naturally, Rodri spent most of the game in a holding midfield position, but when space opened up he was more than capable of pushing forward too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To understand how Rodri, Anderson and someone like Bouaddi might come together, it is key to understand Maresca’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":822618,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-822617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=822617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/822618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=822617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=822617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=822617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}