Rant Roma Regarding - The Offence

I'm not even sure whether the hairstyles are supposed to be intentional, Vucinic for a change looks like he shaves in the dark, Borriello can never turn towards the camera without making me think of Wile E. Coyote and the way he looks when he's standing suspended after having just stepped off of a cliff (but he wore the Batman mask for a while, so I suppose he's justified, even though if Bruce Wayne had to go around like that he'd have so many people rolling on the floor laughing that the Joker would probably shoot himself). As for Totti, good luck trying to figure out what the fuck happened to his head last Thursday, he looked like one of those goofy Japanese animation characters you get in role-playing games, the ones where they have swords the size of a planet's dick and dialogue going something like [GUY:] "I'm so tough, I'm gonna make you eat your balls for breakfast!" [GIRL:] "I can see, you've got a sensitive side somewhere beneath you... stop being so insensitive and inhuman... liberate yourself from your hatred..." [OLD GUY:] "(some wise stuff)".

But the hairstyles aside, there's another problem. It may seem strange to speak of problems in a department which could probably inspire the sequel for Midget Spice's song 'It's raining men halleluja' (was her name Midget Spice? I'm sorry. Anyway she may have an even better time going to Milan, and I'm sure she'd find someone of her level in Robinho, no offence by the by).

So what's the problem? The exact same thing as in all other departments! The management decided to FOLLOW THE GLITZ, keeping in mind that OLD IS BETTER THAN NEW. And so they purchased Adriano. The guy's been deconstructed quite thoroughly, so I'll contain myself. I'm aware it's a gamble that could pay off, but as long as we're gambling, why not do so on someone young? In fact, why not simply nurture Okaka? As with Cerci, not everyone is a fan of the man. You may claim that in order for him to pay off, it would require lots of time and investment. Fine, but how much time and investment has Adriano cost us so far? Youth is a gamble by default. Buying a waning star is also a gamble, but the difference between the two things is that the former usually costs a tenth of the price of the latter. Even if we choose to forget priorities (which, again, should have gone to the midfield), we could have had a player just as fruitful for a fraction of the price.

I'm actually not even a huge fan of Borriello. I applaud management for having taken him only because he came practically for free. In truth, he underscores the managerial philosophy which I've been criticising all this time. He has been scoring very much, no doubt. But I think he's benefited from Roma's current game, not the other way round. In a team playing fresher, faster football, the type of football I'd expect from a team thinking towards the future, I don't think he'd have fared quite as well. He's a good addition to a flawed type of team - in other words, he's the right piece of jigsaw puzzle if you're building an ugly picture. He's not the kind of player I'd like to see in a team managed according to modern principles.

Incidentally, Menez is perhaps the most important player in the Roman team at the moment, and he's an example of just how much there is to gain from investment in youth. He is also the only player we can be certain will still be effective three years from now. Everybody else will be pushing age boundaries, or even crashed past them like suvs. Since we currently have five forwards in our roster (Menez, Totti, Adriano, Vucinic, Borriello), this means that in order to keep up our ranks, we'll have to buy four new forwards over the next three years. At what kind of price? Sure, Okaka and other youth products may have their comeback, but they're never going to mature and be useful until we start effing playing them. Suppose that instead of Adriano we'd purchased, say, Giovinco (I know, it's impossible with Ranieri as our coach, but then getting rid of Ranieri is part of the problem). Not only we'd have a player who would likely have been far more useful than, erm, the "Emperor" has been so far, but over the next three years, we'd have one less forward to buy, and we could have invested that money on the midfield or the defence. I mentioned Giovinco because he was the most important young star up for grabs this year, and it's unbelievable that he ended up at Parma. But he's not the only kid with potential. And as long as you're gambling, you gamble the right way - with patience and work and minimising expenses, not by FOLLOWING THE GLITZ.

Conclusions. The future.

I've outlined three paradigms which have been behind management's philosophy in the last few years. I'll state them again:

FOLLOW THE GLITZ
OLD IS BETTER THAN NEW
GOOD FACTORS ARE A CONSTANT

These are not minor issues which every team suffers from in a form or another. They are very serious strategic shortcomings, inaugurating problems which we shall drag along with ourselves for the next five years (if not longer). They are also all related and interdependent. You can't get rid of one without flushing out the others, because they're all rooted in the same fallacious vision of how a team should be managed, one which prizes the ephemeral over the concrete and holds immediacy to be a greater virtue than patience. Not that everything should be prospective, there's seasonal results which must be be prioritised over future investments. But neither should the present come at the expense of the future, and yes, that's what happening now, and the fact we've been doing this for the past few years is the reason we're taking damage today.

I've been one of the most vocal defenders of the Sensi oligarchy back when the ghost of Soros loomed over the eternal city, but now for the first time I find myself hoping for a change of management. In fact, I even hope to see a new Coach soon enough (not right now, obviously). I want guys above who build a team properly and a Coach below who implements their resources with modern thought and modern football. Ranieri is great at patching stuff, not at creating it. I fear the same may be true of the Sensi, ever since Franco passed away.

This team needs neither youth nor money, neither tactics nor players. It needs vision. And it's only by changing management that we're going to get that.

That's all I've got to say. Peace out.

Closing note. I've actually brought this blog back online because I'm on holiday. I don't know how long it's going to last, but while I'm here, I'm going to drop down my thoughts on the team as it develops (amid more regular posts). Should last until the end of February. Enjoy!

Rant Roma Regarding - The Midfield

I have no idea what this image has to do with anything

And so on to the next grand issue. The midfield. Last year saw Pizarro playing a season which was a bit like Ridley Scott's 79-84 period, absolute unrepeatable gold. I think if there's one player getting the credit for how well Roma did last year in the second half of the campionato, that's him. In terms of performances, he was the best regista in Italy, no less.

There was little doubt around Chili Smurf's being the starter again this year. I didn't agree with that, and that's why I was advocating the purchase of a new regista. In fact, I hold that this is where all the energies and resources should have been invested - not on Adriano, but in getting our hands on a regista who could truly break the mould. If you've really got to FOLLOW THE GLITZ, at least do so where it matters, in the part of the field where it's really needed. It was simply impossible to expect Pizarro to have another season at the same levels, and as far as I was concerned, it would have been great to have had him coming off the bench.

Management decided not to change this particular starter because GOOD FACTORS ARE A CONSTANT, and what else is there to say? When Pizarro went down like Apollo 13, it turns out that the most useful and functional pawn we grabbed over the entire summer mercato is, yo there bro, Simplicio, the closest thing to a regista we've got. In fairness to management, they did at least do *something* here, unlike with Riise, where they sat on the dynamite scratching their bellies. Still, Simplicio was intended as an airbag, as a safety measure for those times when Pizarro had to be rested in view of the Champions League games. Imagine if instead we'd invested on, say, Andrea Poli. As well as the performances, what kind of prospects would that offer for the next three years?

Instead, looking at the team entering the field to play Catania made me want to cry. Cassetti, Taddei, even Perrotta, and Totti, who had the most precipitous fall of form this year. All of the names whose role was to provide speed and dynamism to the team (except for Menez) were slow and dehydrated. Ranieri's been a mixed bag tactically, alternating some strokes of genius like taking off Totti and De Rossi to win the derby with some monumental fuck-ups like, well, much of the first half of this season. But one thing I don't like is his football philosophy, which weds itself perfectly to that of the higher strata of management. Like the upper echelons, Ranieri believes that OLD IS BETTER THAN NEW, and so he'll let someone like Cerci go die in Fiorentina because he prefers playing Taddei. I actually don't mind Taddei as long as he's used sparingly, and I was in awe of him in the 2006-07 season (second best player of that year after Totti, even more impressive than De Rossi). But not in 2011, goddamn it!! At least not in a team which is meant to compete for the Scudetto.

(I should also add that I'm one of the staunch defenders of Cerci, and that I realise this is a subjective matter. But yes, Cerci, like Andreolli, required patience and trust. Neither were given, and I can't blame him for leaving. If he becomes a starter for the Azzurri before the next World Cup I'll be the last to be surprised - there's so few Italian players in his specific role).

Anyway, Ranieri seems to have no problem building his teams around a very slow core, leaving the forwards kind of fending off for themselves. Unsurprisingly, the other midfielder he gave away aside from Cerci was Guberti, who was the 'other' fast midfielder we had. His tactics, for what little I've seen of them this season, seem something like "Toss that dang ball to Menez and wait till that frog-swallowing baby-faced Hugh Laurie invents something." For the rest, all of his midfielders seem to be muscular, substantial types, the kind who could be bouncers outside clubs (last November I was walking drunk through Rue de Chatelet in Paris and I walked up to this bouncer outside a pub and hoarsely yelled, 'Get out of my way, I'm someone important!' I was subject to the same identical foul that De Rossi pulled on Brian McBride in 2006). It's no cause of wonder that Greco flourished this year. There's something funny about the idea of a Greco-DeRossi-Brighi panroman midfield, but it's not really how teams should be built when they're fighting in the Champions League, where speedy football usually gets the edge.

Actually, the Champions League is the one most underestimated factor of the year. I haven't seen a single prediction which seriously took it into account as a major variable. I'm going to quote myself again, this time from the preview to Roma's 2009-2010 season, written before the summer:

The common opinion is that Roma’s objective will be to regain the fourth place. This is true, but in this case the objective belies the potential. People tend to underestimate the difference in mental and physical energy that results from playing or not playing in the Champions League. Roma, being the only great team to be excluded from that competition, will enjoy a considerable advantage over its competitors in the race for the Scudetto. We do not exaggerate when we say that next year Roma could actually win it, if luck is on their side and the referees stop gracing the big three. Roma Club Focus, 11/06/2009.

The fact that we weren't playing in the Champions League is perhaps the biggest reason why we almost won the Scudetto last year. It's the reason Inter dropped a thirteen-point lead, busy thinking about Chelsea and Barcelona. This year, the same conditions do not apply. Incredibly, no-one in either the management or the media seem to have made much of this. Roma's objectives for 2011 were drawn out as though there had been no major shift in conditions - and playing in the Champions League is a GIGANTIC differential. I'd call this an example of the GOOD FACTORS ARE A CONSTANT faux pas, but the blind spot seems to have been so widespread that I hesitate to blame it entirely on Sensi & co.

Sadly, perspectives are not too bright this year either. The team in theory has the talent to compete for the Scudetto now that it has (kind of) stabilised itself, but the tax of playing in the Champions League will produce too much damage on the long run. I'm also afraid that we won't go too far in that tourney itself. As I said, Ranieri's tactics also follow the OLD IS BETTER THAN NEW philosophy and they're old-fashioned, almost obsolete. Borriello's odd goal and Menez's talent, coupled with a talented pair of central defenders, means that he's still a tough bone to chew on. But his teams are too slow and static for a competition like the CL. Prospects are quite grim.

Rant Roma Regarding - The Defence

Ok. I've had the impression that this team was headed for dark times the moment I saw what choices they'd made on the mercato. I mean, Adriano's been made fun of so often that his mother is beginning to think of bringing it to legal terms, but that's not the point. Management philosophy says: FOLLOW THE GLITZ. And so they purchased a forward, and a star. This was, well, how to put this? A fuck-up. It reminds me of that time I sat under a bridge in Newcastle with some friends taking bets on who the seagulls would take a shit on first. The correct mercato moves, as I saw it, were a decent substitute for Riise (the guy has a face a bit like one of those reptiles you see in South America) and a real star in the midfield to take the place of Pizarro, and the foresight proved so accurate that I really wish I had the written document to prove it... oh but wait, I do!

The most urgent requirements are two players for the bench who can substitute, when needed, David Pizarro and John Arne Riise – in other words, a playmaker and left-back. Both these players have had a fantastic year and they’ll be starters again after the summer, but there is no-one to replace them in case of injury or even just fatigue. Roma Club Focus, 09/04/2010.

But management does nothing, because management philosophy says: GOOD FACTORS ARE A CONSTANT. In other words, if something works good, it's going to stay good. This is so dumb I actually feel my IQ jolting just by typing it. We'll discuss the issue of a regista later, but honestly, how the fuck can you expect Riise to keep playing like a locomotive piloted by Steven Seagall as he did the entire last year and never need to sit back, or, MAYBE, get injured?

Then the season starts and, suprise surprise, our reptilian-faced Norwegian bangs his head against a lamp or something and he's down, to the anguish of all the iguanas who support Roma, and who do we substitute him with? Mary Poppins? Jacques Costeau? Anatole France? Oh wait - Marco Cassetti.

Marco Cassetti will remain to me one of those odd, grotesque puzzles which make less and less sense the more you get away from it with age. Some time ago he used to wear his hair and moustache like Adolf Hitler, and people thought my reaction to him was aesthetic. Not at all. It's the way he plays that gets to me. He is not useful in the offence. He is not much good in the defence. He is never seen in the midfield. When everybody else is performing the offside trap, he stands there like a mongoloid, looking around himself with a tragic look of disorientation in his eyes, like a child in one of those Lassie episodes where the kid gets lost by the river and has to hang weeping on to the tree-trunk till the hyperactive collie comes yapping about in the break between yapping to four adolescents taking ecstasy and yapping to a T-Rex that got lost in Greenwood National Park or wherever. I sometimes wonder if Cassetti could walk through the wardrobe of Narnia and enter into the other world and hold a different type of expression on his face for a change. I mean, I've had my issues with Perrotta, but at least that was localised - Perrotta was great at doing everything, but absolutely terrible at shooting. Cassetti is just terrible at everything. It was particularly painful to hear that he was being employed on the left. Why on earth he's still not just in the team but a fucking starter is to me utterly mysterious.

Presumably the reason is that as well as holding to the principles of FOLLOW THE GLITZ and GOOD FACTORS ARE A CONSTANT, management are so full of illuminati that they also follow this little pearl of Tibetan wisdom, OLD IS BETTER THAN NEW. Another retarded assumption. Yay.

Marco Motta did not deserve his spot after his performances started resembling those of a toilet-seat which grew legs and started playing, but I honestly believe that Aleandro Rosi is better than Cassetti, by an arm's length and more. The fact that he's gonna get better with time while Cassetti is going to get worse is another point in his favour. And this reminds me - whatever happened to that young fella, taken from Inter, super-promising young central defender, yes? A certain Andreolli? He was sent away on loan, he had serious injury trouble, which were solved with all due patience, and last year he came back to Roma. AND HE BARELY EVER PLAYED. From what I saw, he really looked intriguing. He was thrown away. I say give him a starter's shirt this year. Yeah, and I'm not even drunk. Give him a starter's shirt over Juan or Mexes or Burdisso (fine start to the season by this last dickhead, by the way). It's a risk, of course it is, but how do you think young players are made? By throwing vitamins against their heads? No, by PATIENCE and by giving them responsibility and by taking risks. You HAVE to, sometimes. This guy wasn't a total stranger, we'd seen him play, he'd shown he had promise. Play him. Yeah, he'll make a few mistakes. He'll allow a few goals. So what. The adult defenders conceded a few stupid goals as well (a certain Juan this Sunday against Sampdoria could have been Ben Stiller, or even Fantozzi). Besides, consider again the youth factor. As time passes, the number of goals he costs you can only go down (if things go according to plan, drastically down). Those of older players will stay the same at best or start going up as they age.

But why put faith in him, right? I mean, remember the tenet, FOLLOW THE GLITZ. And if you've got to buy a new central defender, stick with OLD IS BETTER THAN NEW, so that someone like Burdisso will always be preferable to, say, Cagliari's Davide Astori, who was young, accessible and excellent.

I'm not discussing fantasy football here. I'm speaking seriously. The guy deserved to be used, even in a position as delicate as that of the centre-back. A team that starts the same crap right-back that it did five years ago and throws away the likes of Rosi, Motta, Curci, Antunes and Andreolli in the process is a team where something is seriously wrong. And the 'wrong' starts up there at the level of management.

Coming up tomorrow: The midfield. Exclamation mark!!

Rant Roma Regarding - Prolegomenon

One of the reasons I stopped writing about football was that I'd started working as a sailor on a cruise ship. Considering I worked ten or eleven hours a day, there was little space left to watch the sport, and even less to write about it. Another reason though, or at least the thing which made the pill a little less bitter to swallow, was the fact that I knew we Italy and Roma fans were going to get our arses steamrolled like the highways of Japan in the near future, and I didn't really feel like watching it.

I'll pass on how the World Cup went for the benefit of my over-90 readership who may suffer from a stroke at the mere mention of it, but I'm thinking of this fat pianist who worked on my ship and thought he 'knew a thing or two' about football. When an Italian tells you that he 'knows a thing or two' about football what he means is that you can hear his opinion and die, so I knew I was in for some monologues. So Yoda here is sipping his Scotch at the crew bar and he tells me, with this air of casual solemnity, 'way I see it, Roma are going far this year. I see them in some serious good shape.' My response was that, way I saw it, we weren't going far enough to pick our own noses. The team suffered from some serious structural limitations and the real problem was the whole managerial philosophy behind them, which exacerbated rather than addressed the cracks in the red and yellow dam.

The guy chuckled. (Fat people are particularly exasperating when they chuckle at you). Me, I didn't say anything. But I bet him a beer for Roma's results against his. A few months later, I had so many beers on credit at that bar that I could have got half of deck 4 as drunk as a bunch of salamanders. 'I don't get it,' Yoda said, shelling out the cash, 'they had such a solid team. They improved so much. Whatever went wrong?'

Yes, whatever did go wrong? I'm going to spend the next few posts explaining why. I guess it's just for the satisfaction of getting to write about football again.

And then there's the fact of pointing out something that I never tire of pointing out. Whenever something doesn't work in a team, you get these football rednecks who start yelling like someone stole their frisbees and pointing their fingers at one particular problem. Like, Claudio Ranieri's the problem! Or, our weak attack is the problem! Or, the new plutonium toothpaste in Coverciano is the problem! Or, the fact that Marco Cassetti has been tied to a dead elephant for the last twenty years is the problem, and the fact that we've purchased another dead elephant (Adriano) on the mercato is also the problem!

No. When you lose one match, maybe there is one problem (which is why one single problem is enough to screw up an entire World Cup campaign, see Dunga's Brazil and the most rigid 4-2-3-1 in history, but anyway). When a whole half-season is going pear-shaped, then THERE'S ALMOST NEVER just one problem, it is always a COMBINATION of problems. A single problem can be solved quickly. A combination of problems perpetuate each other and require ages to be disentangled (see Spalletti's trouble in getting the old Roma back on their feet, and the time it took Ranieri to restabilise it).

At the heart of it, these problems are caused by a deeply flawed football philosophy entertained at the levels of management, one which leads to choices which, on the long run, really hurt the team. Why do I say this? Let's break it down, and let's go see exactly where the problems lie - or, more accurately, how the exact same problems re-present themselves for all departments of the team, leading to a single unified brain meltdown.

Coming up tomorrow: Part 1, The Defence.

Shopping for girls

Friends and allies,

If there’s something I hate it’s that way that vomit has of rebounding onto the concrete and returning like a bloody boomerang onto your shoes. Not that they were new shoes, mind you – I needed to buy a fresh pair anyway. But the fact that destiny should remind me with the tidal wave method was a little jarring.

I understand that that’s a bit of a drab opening (“ooh look at me, I got drunk the other day, I’m like, so cool!”), especially considering I haven’t put a word in a blog since Matusalem’s grandfather was conceived, but I’m afraid it was the necessary prologue – both to my writing, and to its subject. You see, I underwent a revelation. An epiphany, if you like. One of those things in which you stare absently at a light bulb for an hour until eventually some bird comes pecking on one of your nuts and you suddenly figure out ‘Oh my God, that hurts like hell’ and finally wake up to send the bird away. Imagine what that must be like. That’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t expect to have happened even to Christ while he was on the cross, and yet we all undergo some major revelation at some stage in our lives which allows for the woodpeckers or robins or whatever comes by to hit a trance rhythm on our balls.

I’m sure your expectations by now have mounted as high as my aforementioned vomit in my throat, so before they fall back down to the ground (again like my aforementioned…), here’s the meat and the potato: I have understood what shopping is like for girls! I had to tour a couple of stores to find some new shoes, and I’ve comprehended what this activity means for the ladies. It’s basically like clubbing in the day-time. You walk into the shop and you’re sledge-hammered in the face by some blaring grunge music which always reminds me of a lorry crashing into a small house and breaking it down, there’s bodyguards outside and a crowd inside that runs like they were in the Pamplona bull race, God knows what for. If you’ve seen the film Platoon, then it’s just like that: an Indochinese warfare for the friggin’ shoe-shelves, charges and digging trenches, people weeping in a corner, huddled up and screaming “I can’t take it! I can’t take it!” and mortars covering the perfume sections… something. Got carried away a little.

Now that you’ve finally resolved this question of incredible interest to you about the fact that I’ve got new shoes, we can talk about something more interesting – like the weather. Well it’s been a couple of degrees short of the ice age over here and I can barely walk at night, let alone falter, the grass-fields outside in the morning are as white as Hillary Clinton’s ass after she’s rubbed it with sour cream (that was the worst analogy I’ve ever used), and I’m working like a bitch night and day. I was reading Tennyson’s Maud the other day and tonight I went to see a live poetry event which was dominated by a beat poetry hip hop guy who looked like he didn’t have the strength to inject enough cocaine into his dick to stand up straight (I mean him, not the dick). As far as lowering one’s standards goes, that’s got to be up there with Tom Cruise going from banging Nicole Kidman to eating the placenta of that black-haired goat-resembling girl he’s shagging now (or whatever else he’s done in the gross cultic bullshit he undergoes with his fellow priests – was it something like showering with the amniotic fluid? I’m not even joking. But whatever).

One of the links that led me to writing on this site has been sports, so I thought I may say a couple of words about that. Unfortunately, this conjuncture catches me with all the good timing of a Kamikaze pilot crashing on his own fishing boat on the day that his father is testing the new nets. I follow football, where by football I mean what yanks bizarrely call ‘soccer’ like it’s a sport for people who get socked (the only other etymological link I can find between the two has to do with socks, and I’m passing on that. To my knowledge footballers never did wear kinds of socks so peculiar and distinctive that their entire sport would come to be identified by that name. By this logic we might call the sport of Swimming ‘Bermudas’ because people used to wear Bermudas back then. ‘Hey look, Michael Phelps just won eight gold medals in Bermudas, his mother must be so proud.’). Anyway, going back to the pre-parenthesis oratory, I was saying that this is a severely difficult time for me to speak of football because of the current state of AS Roma, the squad I support in Serie A. The team’s form lately has been less that of a football team and more that of eleven sacks of shit thrown randomly onto the field and expected to run and shoot together like it had been implanted in their DNA. Every time I see them play this year it reminds me of a battle I saw once in a documentary where a band of chimps repelled the onslaught of a solitary camera-man by storming him with cannon-balls of turd. In this case the role of the camera-man is mine and Roma represent the party throwing shit at me for watching. As someone else once said, I would rather fuck the Queen of England than write about how we have been doing in that sport, so I think I’m going to close this dissertation here before it pisses me off.

Oi, begorrah! Onwards ye masses!

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: Debt is owed to Max Tyler for some of the material in the first paragraphs of this entry!