“You can pretend a couple of times, play a role a bit, but in the end you are what you are,” Rodrigo Hernández says, and he is a deep midfielder. The way he tells it, player and person are inseparable and everything makes sense. Listening to him talk a little like he plays – intelligently, thoughtfully, calmly – it is as if there is an inevitability about it all, an inescapable logic; like this is just what he is and where he was always going to be, even if his story need not have brought him here, to his place: the middle of a football pitch.
Rodri sits on a bench on the grass at Spain’s Las Rozas training camp, tracing his journey. He hasn’t come far – he was raised near here to the north-west of Madrid and began playing just down the road – but he has come a long way, learning en route. He describes himself as a sponge, soaking it all up, from Madrid to Villarreal and back via a university degree he’s still doing and on to Manchester, where he became the most expensive player in City’s history.
Written by Sid Lowe in Madrid
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/oct/18/rodri-manchester-city-klopp-teams-animals-knife-university-improve under the title “Rodri: ‘Klopp’s teams go at you like animals. They’re like a knife’”. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
