{"id":567189,"date":"2026-07-25T06:53:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T06:53:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/567189\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T06:53:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T06:53:08","slug":"how-do-man-city-deal-with-the-rodri-dilemma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/567189\/","title":{"rendered":"How do Man City deal with the Rodri dilemma?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">To understand how Rodri, Anderson and someone like Bouaddi might come together, it is key to understand Maresca&#8217;s game model.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">As a disciple of positional play, he draws comparisons between his football and chess.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;There are a lot of similarities,&#8221; Maresca said. &#8220;The most important is positional play and strategy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;For a coach, it&#8217;s important to have the mentality of a chess player: develop a plan, study counter-moves, choose the arrangement of the pieces.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Maresca&#8217;s strategy has largely been rooted in an on-the-ball shape that looks like a 3-2-2-3.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">One of Rodri&#8217;s most useful qualities in a Maresca side would be his ability to move between these predefined positions on the pitch.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">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<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">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&#8217;s&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":567190,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-567189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}