When Spaniard Luis Enrique was announced as AS Roma coach, in attempt to bring a different style more in tune with what the Asturian had been operating under as Barcelona B manager, my first reaction was skepticism. I couldn´t believe the rumor that the club would change that much philosophically from what Claudio Ranieri had imposed on them after Luciano Spaletti left for Russia. I certainly couldn’t believe that the club would entrust the job of rebuilding the giallorossi to an inexperienced Spaniard with no first team coaching experience. Then, considering how stagnant an environment Trigoria had become last year, I had a change of heart. I thought it might be able to work, if and only if, Enrique brought Roma´s volatile captain Francesco Totti to his side. The first signs were great, Totti liked the attacking focus and Enrique talked of his unparalleled captain. The bloom is off the rose.
After a 1-0 loss to Slovan Bratislava where Okaka, Caprari and Bojan Krkić started and Totti and Marco Borriello were left on the bench until the 70th minute, il capitano was not amused and has come out publicly against his former combatant. Totti returned to training but he had had enough, or at least that´s what he had printed on a t-shirt he wore to the next training session. The newspapers have been stoking the flames, and the supporter´s have been vocal about their beloved captain: ¨Totti is not discussed, he is loved.¨
I realize now that it was always going to tough to make such a drastic change. Luis Enrique has many strikes against him that were always going to come into play in changing the atmosphere around the club.
First of all, he´s a foreign coach in a league that prides itself on its ability to first and foremost raise the world´s best tacticians and where every fan is as tactically savvy (or at least in their own opinion) with any of them let alone a Spaniard. If Rafa Benitez, who had won a Champions League trophy with Liverpool, couldn’t bend an Italian team to his will how is anyone going to expect a relative rookie to make the important and difficult choices that transform AS Roma into a club to contend in the next decade.
There is also the talisman factor. Francesco Totti has lorded over his fiefdom at the Stadio Olimpico for much of the 17 years he has been at the club. It is the most difficult of battles to face-off against a myth. You can do as Maurico Pochettino did at RCD Espanyol when he benched kingmaker captain Raúl Tamudo and succeeded in taking control of a club that had eaten through coaches for much of the last decade and while the supporter´s complained there was little backlash from the press. Despite a similar lack of experience when hired, it was relatively easy for Pochettino to cement his vision on the floundering club because he was helped greatly by being a former club-captain, a legend in his own right. That´s not the only way to make transitions easier for a club with talismanic players. Raúl Gonzalez Blanco had a similar relationship with Real Madrid. It was an unspoken mandate at the club that coaches had to run important club decisions by Raúl and his vice-captains. He had the chairman´s ear on practically all decisions and the litmus test for coaches who survived at Real Madrid were whether or not they could find a place for an aging striker at the point of attack for los blancos. So when José Mourinho came to the club and one of his proclamations was that he was not going to be counting on clubhouse lawyers like Raúl and Guti, I thought it was the first of many landmines that would fall at the feet of the ¨Special One¨, but for-better or-for-worse, José has transformed Real Madrid from top-to-bottom in his image. It´s an amazing success viewed from that angle alone and whether you like it or not, this is not your father´s or your grandfather´s Real Madrid. It is certainly not Raúl Gonzalez Blanco´s Real Madrid either. Now, José Mourinho has a cult of personality to match Raúl´s, he has his own entourage controlling his image and is as press-savvy as any coach on the planet, but I think José would have been hard-pressed to deal with Francesco Totti. Totti is no diplomat like Raúl. He´s Roma´s gladiator, it´s warrior and the tifosi love him for staying all these years despite interest from some of the biggest clubs in the world. At Real Madrid Totti might have been one in a long-line of galacticos, but at Roma he has become a demi-god. He is AS Roma. If Jose would have a rough time changing the culture at Totti’s Roma, how can a relative novice like Luis Enrique be expected to do the same? It may only be until years after Totti retires that the club can move on.
Lastly, there is the ultimate fool´s dream, ¨to play like Barcelona.¨ It´s what got José fired from Chelsea: Roman Abramovich´s dream to play more attractively and José´s inability to foster that dream. It also got Sergio Batista fired at this summer´s Copa América in Argentina: his homeland´s plan to exploit its greatest player´s comfort in playing in the classic 4-3-3. It is a system that values ball-control, possession and movement and requires the sort of player that in today´s day and age is rare. Quick of feet and quick in thought, the Barcelona-type player is a holdover from an age where the athleticism and directness of today had little meaning. The system may be easy to install, a matter of switching positions on the field, but it´s the players that are key to making it work. They brought in Bojan to play the false winger that cuts in from either side and arrives late. Jose Angel of Sporting Gijon, a player who rejected a series of offers from Barça earlier this summer, could slot in nicely in that Abidal role and Loic Nego gives them similar qualities on the right, plus Stecklenberg gives them a more athletic and assured keeper, but I´m not entirely sure that right now they have the right kind of player overall to run a Barcelona 4-3-3 even if they do sign as expected Italo-Argentine Pablo Daniel Osvaldo from Espanyol as a more athletic target man than either Marco Borriello or the recently departed Mirko Vucinic. It´s an aging squad with players more and more static on the pitch. The most important question of all however is where on that alignment of players does a fantasista like Totti play?
One day the project that new owner Thomas Di Benedetto has begun will take fruit at the Stadio Olimpico. One day Luis Enrique will find a better fit for his tactical set-up. It is likely that five years from now we will be lauding both groups equally, but right now, at this time AS Roma is very far-away idealistically from the sort of sweeping changes that both owner and coach are pulling them towards. It may have been better to have taken a small step towards change than the Spanish Revolution that appears headed southward sooner than at first expected.
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