Bologna Club Focus: All along the watchtower

Date: 19th March 2014 at 9:24pm
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Thus begins All Along The Watchtower by Bob Dylan, a song that frequently springs to mind when watching the Rossoblu at home, because of the Tower of Marathon watching over their pitch. It will do so for next Sunday’s crunch clash with Cagliari.

Far be it from me to suggest who may be the joker or the thief in Bologna’s line up but Domenico Morleo went to ground a little easily, and rather stole a penalty in their game at Livorno on Sunday, while the wild card up Davide Ballardini’s sleeve, Robert Acquafresca, failed to come up trumps.

It remains painfully obvious that there may, yet, be no way out of the trouble the team find themselves in, dropping into the relegation zone after another disappointing result.

In nature, there is an observable tendency that brightly coloured creatures are generally best left alone because their colours signify danger. This is why certain ladybirds are black and bright red, and wasps are yellow and black. Sadly, that colour schemata doesn’t translate to Italian football.

AC Milan might fly a respectable flag for red and black, but nobody fears the Giallonero; Fersina Perginese the highest ranked. Bologna’s lime change strip is more reminiscent of a bullfrog – the type that gives their poison for arrows. It is there that the similarity ends. Even after Ballardini’s reshuffle – further enforced when Panagiotis Kone left the field with a recurrence of his injury – Bologna did not look like they were particularly likely to bring down Livorno

 “There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief”

Sunday’s game finished with Bologna playing against nine men. That it took a penalty against a team who had seen two of their players dismissed before the Rossoblu broke their duck was perhaps fitting. Even with Acquafresca busying himself in attack – and he looked no less of a goal threat than Bianchi – the Felsinei looked toothless. There is a bright spot, though. Lazaros, perhaps fittingly, has upped his game in recent weeks. In a team of dead men walking, he looked dynamic, bright and deserved his goal – a free kick that Bardi had to dive well to push round his post towards the end of the first half suggested he was in the mood, and it was a fine penalty late on.

 “No reason to get excited”

The previously strong defence floundered in the face of Innocent Emeghara. He particularly exploited flaws time and again before his dismissal, looking every bit as if he were proving a point. His was the second of the two sendings off that allowed Bologna back into the game, although their late plan of getting the ball wide and flinging in crosses never looked like paying dividends towards the end – a couple of tame headers flopping wide of Bardi’s goal being the closest they came to an equaliser.

There is a definite lack of invention in the team, and each striker that is drafted in looks to be out of their depth –first Bianchi, then Cristaldo, occasionally Moscardelli and now Acquafresca have all failed to profit from paltry service from a midfield set up to contain rather than create; the absence of Alessandro Diamanti, who opened his account for Guangzhou Evergrande in the week, is keenly felt.

 “You and I, we’ve been through that”

It is a familiar story; a Rossoblu side who look bereft of spark find it very difficult to get anything from games in which they concede – this is a team who have allowed the opposition to score first on seventeen occasions, and gained only six points from those games (one win, three draws), while failing to score twelve times (the same amount as Sunday’s opponents Livorno). The league position doesn’t lie, and evidence is both damning and building as to why Bologna are so low in Serie A.

 “So let us not talk falsely now; the hour is getting late.”

Time is running out for Bologna – with ten games to go, things have to change quickly if they are to retain top flight status. With Cagliari visiting the Stadio Renato dall’Ara next weekend, there is another opportunity for improvement. March was always going to be an important month; games against Chievo Verona and Atalanta are to come before a trickier set of games. Any bid for survival will have to be started immediately; those ten games will disappear in the blink of an eye.

Dylan changed his live arrangement of All Along The Watchtower after hearing Jimi Hendrix’s cover, conceding Hendrix did it better. It may well be time for Bologna to start doing something different in their quest to survive; if they’re looking for examples, there is no shortage of teams who are doing it better.

 

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