Rodri was wearing his newly-awarded Premier League champion’s medal when he was asked, minutes after pipping Arsenal to the title for the second season running, a fairly open-ended question about how Pep Guardiola motivates his Manchester City players to keep on winning.
This was the fourth consecutive year he’d ended with one of those medals around his neck. The midfielder could have gone in any direction with his answer, given any number of platitudes.
Instead, he chose to rub salt in the wounds of Mikel Arteta’s team, by claiming City sensed a psychological inferiority in their rivals when Arsenal had happily left the Etihad Stadium with a point from a goalless draw between the two title contenders a couple of months earlier.
“To be honest, it’s in here,” Rodri said to broadcaster Optus Sport, pointing to his head.
“It’s the mentality. Arsenal did an unbelievable season, but I think the difference was in here,” once again tapping away at his temple. “When they came here, they faced us at the Etihad, I saw them… I said, ‘These guys, they don’t want to beat us, they just want a draw’.
“And that mentality, we wouldn’t do it the same way. At the end, if you give us one point, we will win the last seven, eight games, even though how tough it is. So I think it is in terms of mentality.”
“These guys don’t want to beat us, they just want to draw…”
After @ManCity won the title by two points last season, Rodri referenced the 0-0 home draw to Arsenal that gave him confidence.
The two sides meet again at Etihad Stadium this Sunday…
🎥 @OptusSport pic.twitter.com/Tn63IUiyYZ
— Premier League (@premierleague) September 20, 2024
It was a stinging assertion for a rival to make so publicly, just as Arteta was simultaneously rousing the Emirates Stadium crowd after Arsenal’s final-day win against Everton, stating “we want more… and we are gonna get it”.
Arsenal, top of the table and a point ahead of City with 10 games each to go at kick-off, had camped deep in their own half for much of that match at the end of March, largely looking for counter-attacking opportunities to pinch the game. It very nearly worked, too — had Leandro Trossard squared the ball to Gabriel Martinelli in one passage of play, Arsenal could have stolen it.
They only had 27 per cent of possession though and, in the second half, showed little attacking intent. City had 12 shots in the match to their six, two big chances to zero, 40 touches in the opposition box to 15 and made seven clearances to Arsenal’s 24.
Arsenal went into that fixture having scored 33 goals in eight successive league wins, yet it felt very much like mission accomplished when they headed back to London with a point — becoming the first Premier League side to stop City scoring in 58 home games — a plan perfectly executed. It would have been had Arsenal been perfect, like City were, in winning the remaining nine matches, but the draw gave them no margin for error and they slipped up two weeks later, losing 2-0 at home against Aston Villa.
By not standing toe-to-toe, especially on a day when City were missing goalkeeper Ederson and defender Kyle Walker through injury, Rodri interpreted Arsenal’s set-up as an act of submission, a surrendering of the high ground.
Despite the Spaniard’s subtle goading, it feels inevitable that Arsenal will set up in a similar fashion on their return to the Etihad today (Sunday) to how they did in March. As they showed in the 1-0 away win against arch-rivals Tottenham last weekend, they have the defensive resilience to soak up pressure for long spells without wilting.
It could deliver them another point, which would widely be seen as a good result. That would extend their unbeaten run against City to four games, a sequence which started with the Community Shield penalty shoot-out victory last year. It would not, however, erase the fact that Arsenal’s most recent win at City was in January 2015, suffering eight defeats in a row by a combined score of 22-4 before that point last season.
There is the danger that, until they go out and hunt City on their own patch, Rodri will continue to believe they are facing challengers who feel inferior, that Arsenal are hoping to wait them out rather than take the throne they’ve held since 2021 by force. There is a psychological significance to directly inflicting a blow on your nearest, or perhaps only, contender.
Suggest that Arsenal should be bolder and the 4-1 Etihad defeat which all but ended their 2022-23 title hopes in the April of that season is usually returned as a conversation-ender. Arsenal played an expansive style that day and were duly ripped apart, but they had Rob Holding deputising for an injured William Saliba in central defence and were in their first title challenge as a squad.
Eighteen months is a long time in football and Arsenal have added David Raya, Jurrien Timber, Riccardo Calafiori, Declan Rice and Kai Havertz to their ranks since. They are a much stronger team, able to match City physically, and having firmly established themselves as one of the two best sides in the league, doing so while playing imaginative football.
Arsenal showed they are capable of imposing their natural game on City at the Emirates in the October of last season, when they won 1-0. It was a more entertaining match as the momentum regularly shifted, even if there were, again, few chances.
With this season considered likely to become a third consecutive two-horse title race between these two sides, the master-and-apprentice relationship of the managers, the three ex-City players attempting to topple an empire they helped build (Raheem Sterling, Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko), the best attack versus the best defence, this fixture should be emerging as a Premier League classic.
So far, however, the overlap between Guardiola and Arteta seems to have stymied the entertainment when their teams meet. The cumulative xG for City and Arsenal across their last four encounters is just 5.13, averaging well under a goal a game each.
They appear to be two teams whose knowledge of each other is so incestuous that they often cancel each other out, reducing the space for drama and spontaneity. A chess game can be intriguing but it has not yet been the blockbuster many have hoped for.
Styles make fights, and perhaps that is why Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool team made such perfect sparring partners for City. They had less of the possession when those teams met too, but there was a clash of identities and styles that produced a different kind of tension. Right now, it is two magnets repelling each other rather than the crunch of tectonic plates colliding.
If the football is not magical in these big games then there is usually an element of bad blood to fall back on. But Rodri’s comments in May were the first bit of needle there has really been.
Apart from a quick shoving match between Kevin De Bruyne and Arteta, and words between Gabriel and Erling Haaland at full-time in March, it has been quite cosy.
In yesteryear, Rodri’s quotes would be pinned up on the dressing-room wall as a way to provoke the Arsenal players, firing them up by taking it as City questioning their mindset and ambition. Someone would certainly have let him know they were there with a robust challenge in the early stages of the match.
Do the personalities exist to give this fixture that kind of edge? Take the Arsenal and Manchester United rivalry from 1998 until 2004. The football was often not for purists but Arsene Wenger vs Sir Alex Ferguson on the touchline and Patrick Vieira vs Roy Keane on the pitch were gripping individual battles, and Martin Keown celebrating in Ruud van Nistelrooy’s face after the latter missed a penalty was one of the many incidents that showed how profound the hatred was between them.
When Chelsea’s new money arrived around then, it spawned another great rivalry with Manchester United. They were usually tight affairs too — an average of 30 fouls per game between 2004 and 2011 — but they were unmissable because Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho alone was box office and the contests were often vicious and bitter.
You sense there is the potential for the City-Arsenal rivalry to finally ignite this afternoon. It needs it.
If Arsenal do step up to the role of aggressors today and are able to end a near-decade of hurt at the Etihad, they will have landed a severe blow to Rodri and City’s sense of superiority.
(Top photos: Getty Images)
