( Blog) The capital's cyclone

Monday January 23 2012The capital’s cyclone
Week 19 confirmed Luis Enrique’s Roma as a credible force. Rob Paton rounds up an intriguing weekend of goals.


With just 20 seconds on the clock, Gabriel Heinze moved out of defence, looked up from the centre circle and played a hopeful pass towards Cesena’s penalty area. Guillermo Rodriguez’ mistake, Erik Lamela’s clever back-heel and Francesco Totti’s first-time finish that followed all culminated in Roma taking an opening-minute lead.

Followed by a quick-fire double in the eighth minute – Totti’s record-breaking second strike and Fabio Borini’s just 30 seconds after that – the directness of Week 19’s performance seemingly confirmed the emergence of Luis Enrique’s Roma.

Indeed, the size of the eventual 5-1 score-line was less significant to the Giallorossi than the manner in which it was achieved. Alongside the timing of the goals and the pace of the team’s play was a relentlessness to ripple the net. Inside the first half hour, Enrique’s men had registered 10 further shots. La Gazzetta dello Sport remarked that only the rain interrupted their ‘cyclone’ of a performance, but that they only needed a third of the match to beat their opponents.

Extending the Giallorossi’s unbeaten run to six – and discrediting the unfinished fixture with Catania –

the club have won the last four in a row and have now scored almost as many goals in the last six games that they had managed in the previous 13. A game that will likely increase calls for the board to sign Enrique to that improved contract, it represents a far cry from six weeks ago, when returning from Florence and the team’s miserable defeat to Fiorentina, a section of supporters whistled and insulted the Asturian-born tactician.

Certainly, where support from the club has seemingly never wavered, by December a worrying set of statistics suggested that Enrique’s tika-taka football was not adapting to foreign fields. Where the team was dominating possession in games and rivalling Barcelona for possession stats, the Romans were mid-table after 13 played, had lost more times than they had won, had a Goals For tally comparable to the likes of Parma, Novara and Siena and had seemingly been worked out by their opponents.

The issue was perhaps best highlighted by Week 14’s dismal evening in Florence, when despite having a one, two and then three-man advantage over the Giallorossi, opponents Fiorentina still kept to their original game-plan and allowed Roma majority possession. Indeed, I Lupi’s eight men had 57 per cent of the ball, but it was in a game that saw the Viola create 20 chances to Roma’s seven and run out 3-0 winners.

Enrique’s men were accused of slow, predictable play with players that were not moving off the ball as previously anticipated. Famed Giallorosso supporter, the singer Antonello Venditti, perhaps put it best when commenting that: “There must be consistency, one cannot confuse love with sex, you need both.”

Whilst the second consecutive defeat prompted another assertion from the board that faith in Enrique was long term, it crucially was delivered to the Coach with a reported set of side-points to consider. First, that the Spaniard needed to acknowledge that not all the players could be treated the same anymore, second that the club needed to recapture its identity for fear of the comparisons with Barcelona B and third that Enrique’s physical sessions with the players were to be moderated, so as to cut down on the number of injuries that had hit the squad up to that point.

Whether or not the 41-year-old obliged to all three points is unquantifiable, particularly in light of the first point contradicting his very coaching style. However, Roma have exerted a change and are generating a significant momentum to now take into the second half of the season.

Important to the team’s turnaround has been not the perceived drop in possession stats, or indeed an increased number of long balls played in games – in fact, neither of these has changed much. What has developed, however, is that where earlier in the season long passes have statistically come from just two sources on the pitch – goalkeeper Maarten Stekelenburg and the central defensive midfielder, usually Daniele De Rossi – the number of players trying long-range passes has risen significantly. Another thing that has improved is the contribution from other players – there have been nine different scorers in just the last five League games, one more than the number of different scorers in the previous 13.

From Heinze’s 20th-second long ball to set up the first goal to Miralem Pjanic’s drive, shot and follow-up finish for the fifth goal, Saturday perfectly demonstrated that there are now others in the team equally capable now of initiating and finishing attacking moves. As general manager Franco Baldini recently suggested, nothing has changed in Enrique’s philosophy, only the players’ understanding and application of it.

Equally important to Roma’s win this weekend comes the side-note of Totti’s record-breaking 211th goal for the club. His second against Cesena ensured that he is now the player to have scored the most goals in Serie A history for a single club, overtaking Milan’s Gunnar Nordahl. It is the 11th League or club record the 35-year-old holds.

The Roma captain was one of 12 different players past the 30-year-mark find the back of the net during the weekend. Certainly, it proved to be another weekend dominated by influential performances from strikers in their 30s, from Antonio Di Natale’s excellently-taken volley against Catania and David Di Michele’s 93rd-minute equaliser for Lecce against Chievo to Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s double in Novara that included an inventive back-heeled second. However, perhaps nowhere was the experience of an elder striker felt more than in Sicily in Week 19, where Fabrizio Miccoli’s three assists and one goal seemingly dragged Palermo back into mid-table optimism in an amazing 5-3 win over Genoa.

A lot of praise I feel has been heaped on Luis Enrique recently. I feel he does deserve most of it , but you have to give Sabatini his due also... His signings have proved to be vital...

narbeZ wrote:A lot of praise I feel has been heaped on Luis Enrique recently. I feel he does deserve most of it , but you have to give Sabatini his due also... His signings have proved to be vital...

Baldini to he is the one who picked LE in the first place.

“There must be consistency, one cannot confuse love with sex, you need both.”

Antonello Venditti

^ Speaking of that guy, what a tune!.