At the Olimpico, between Lazio and Rome, the fear of playing football wins.
While the Premier League offers its big match, a spectacular 4-4 at Stamford Bridge between Chelsea and City, Serie A responds with a great classico, the Rome derby. To comment the merciless difference between the two challenges it would be like shooting at the Red Cross, but it is always useful to keep it in mind when you are then surprised during the transfer of television rights that the “Serie A” product is not that attractive after all;
The Roma he presents himself with the usual 3-5-2 and the Dybala-Lukaku pair up front. He approaches the match very well, with an unusual aggressiveness in those latitudes, made of high pressing with the backs and defense arms always aggressive on opposing full-backs and wingers. From the recovery of the ball, which undermines Lazio’s low construction, a couple of scoring opportunities also arrive, which unexpectedly end up on Rick Karsdorp’s unmannerly right foot. Gianluca Mancini’s yellow card after 18′, for a hold to stop Immobile well launched in depth, however leads Roma to a more prudent attitude, and in fact it marks the end of the Giallorossi’s match;
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Sarri, as with Feyenoord, presents a more passive team willing to give the first possession of the ball to the opponent. His Lazio grows during the first half, gradually taking control of the operations, more due to Roma’s demerits than their own merits. The maneuver is never particularly fluid and as the Giallorossi get lower, finding spaces becomes more and more of a puzzle, for which there are no solutions. Only on a couple of occasions does Luis Alberto manage to attack the spaces behind the midfielders, and one of these leads to a crossbar that screams revenge;
The Lazionet of the offensiveist Sarri’s narrative, reveals for the umpteenth time the limitations of a team that struggles to produce opportunities and scores little. The Biancocelesti seem too light up front, thanks to the fact that Ciro Immobile is affected by the invertible passage of time and Felipe Anderson is no longer in “God mode” like last season. Pedro now seems to be at the end of the sunset while Isaksen remains a mysterious object. In a second half more similar to a Florentine football brawl than a Serie A match, he instead gets excited Guendouzigood at deploying both his physicality and his propensity for “mind games” so dear to Mourinho;
In Rome it appears the presence of a heavy pair like Dybala and Lukaku is also in vainsince they don’t even receive a playable ball and the offensive phase, once the illusion of the first 20 minutes has vanished, is reduced to giving them the initiative in isolated situations in the hope that the two can sing and carry the cross. Spinazzola he’s not at his best yet and it shows, but the most dangerous situations still arise from his few forays. With the recent suicides of Milan, Napoli and Atalanta it was legitimate to expect more from two teams that needed to recover points and morale with a view to fourth place. In the end the desire to escape unscathed and not get hurt prevailed, despite the fact that we were only at the twelfth matchday, and this says a lot not only about the current state of the two Roman teams. So different in technical guidance, so equal in approach and in their long-term perspectives.