Manchester City midfielder Rodri was forced off after a little more than 20 minutes of his side\u2019s trip to Brentford, leaving the field with what appears to be a new muscular problem. The 29-year-old had been missing only the opening Premier League match after knee damage sustained at the Club World Cup prompted concern from Pep Guardiola over the summer, yet he returned to start three matches in seven days.<\/p>\n
Rodri had withdrawn from availability against Burnley last weekend, saying he could not feature because of an excess of pain in his knee. He was named in the starting XI for the Brentford match but sank to the turf clutching his hamstring after around 20 minutes.<\/p>\n
Guardiola had warned on the eve of the match that Rodri would not be back to his best until the 2026 World Cup next summer. \u201cThis season will be how we handle it, step by step,\u201d the manager said. \u201cIt\u2019s normal, it was one year on the massage table. The body changes, the rhythm changes. It\u2019s a question of time.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are well understood timelines for recovery from major knee injuries. It takes the best part of year just for a player to just rebuild the strength in their knee and regain some semblance of match fitness after tearing an ACL. The subsequent 12 months are invariably plagued by muscular issues brought on by the shock of returning to the blood and thunder of first-team football on a regular basis.<\/p>\n
City face a period of careful management with their midfield figure, whose recent run of matches appears to have aggravated underlying problems. The early-season choices around his minutes and the timing of returns are now likely to come under scrutiny after another setback so soon after his comeback.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rodri lasted just over 20 minutes at Brentford before leaving with another injury concern. Watch on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3573,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[728,238],"tags":[1073,1081],"class_list":["post-3574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brentford","category-manchester-city","tag-acl-injury","tag-adaptation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}