Martone Matters – Caustic and chaotic calcio chronicles

Date: 21st August 2015 at 10:00am
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Serie A TIMGreetings fellow calcio junkies, the season is fast approaching like Silvio Berlusconi’s early evening curfew. Just like AC Milan’s eternal leader, Rav ‘The Chav’ Morrison has managed to stay out of jail and will be joining Carpi and Frosinone in nervous anticipation for their first game in the world’s most entertaining league.

During the course of this new season, this blog will mainly be incredulous; incredulous that calcio is not in its nineties heyday, incredulous that modern footballers (and young men in general) are drawn-faced, designer bearded, garishly tattooed and look like very rich POW camp victims with eyebrows sponsored by Nike.

Indeed, this summer’s incredulity began with Fabio Capello, a (recently universally respected) coach that seems to have created a new way to become insanely rich in football by being terrible. It wasn’t that long ago when the FA (they smugly don’t put English before it ) gave him a fist full of millions to leave London. Now, Russia have apparently paid the world’s most affluent Postman Pat look-alike €11 million to briskly move out the backdoor faster than a Wham tribute act.

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Could Micronesia (a real country not an acute form of brain damage) be the next stop on Capello’s exotic international mystery tour? Surely his overbearing, antiquated defensive methods could shave them down to conceding a goal every three minutes instead of two? Anyone who missed Micronesia’s legendary Pacific Games exploits needs to visit mankind’s omniscient Google friend now.

Meanwhile, the tragically fading, baroque, high commissioner of calcio dreams, Andrea ‘Mozart’ Pirlo, took his show to Broadway. ESPN, CBS, NBC CNN, etc all blanket covered Pirlo’s first match – Fox News chose to broadcast an NRA sponsored infomercial on ‘gun-safety’ at the cinema hosted by Nancy Reagan in 3D glasses holding an Uzi.

In MLS, like the rest of the curious country’s sporting ‘leagues’, there is no relegation. The franchises get their draft picks changed around every year. Frank Lampard’s monthly Manhattan penthouse rent is the equivalent of the average annual wage of an MLS defender, $67000. That means the non-salary cap player choices are all imported attacking players. It makes the ‘league’ even more of a farce than it looks. It’s as fair and equal as sending Justin Beiber in to fight Floyd Mayweather Jr. That’s the real reason Giovinco now looks like Leo Messi, he’s the same flawed player but now playing against inexperienced US college-level defenders.

Elsewhere, Manchester United kept up their propensity to go from Pogba to Cantona in the transfer market. Matteo Darmian may well represent the bargain of the whole this summer’s bonanza. In my opinion, he is the best left, right and possibly even centre-back at that club.

This is the same club that spent around €150 million on Mata, Shaw and Fellaini, the same club that somehow accomplishes the proverbial “one step forward, two steps backwards”. Sergio Romero is that precisely that reverse step. Sampdoria’s former third choice keeper has under two hundred club appearances at the age of 28 and his ability to replace the potentially departing David De Gea is about as convincing as Massimo Taibi’s.

This first contribution to the blogosphere and ever-growing English word, calcio echo-chamber, will focus on the summer dealings of the teams I feel will form the Serie A top three, the next will deal with the rest.

Juventus
Andrea Pirlo and Carlos Tevez are irreplaceable, Arturo Vidal however, is not. Prior to last season, Vidal was a force of nature, one of the planet’s very best midfielders. Last season, however, the fellow looked like he was towing a caravan whilst simultaneously channelling the spirit of Mohamed Sissoko. If anybody thinks Juve cannot win without Arturo Vidal, then what happened last season?

A few summer football goals against the Jamaican bobsleigh team and the cast of Bolivian Duck Dynasty produced the perfect planetary alignment for Juve’s lauded transfer guru “Beppe” Marotta to cash in on a player who seems to have physical problems and could well have peaked – like when Shevchenko was (mis)sold to Chelsea, perhaps?

In the absence of Urby Emanualson and the continued inexplicable non-recognition of Paul Pogba’s clearly amazing skill-set for the role, Mr. Max Allegri has gone all soccer-hipster, dug out the old colloquial phrase book and demanded a trequartista – I thought they only now existed on discarded VHS cassettes that came with cheap Italian liqueur?

Said search has transmogrified my daily calcio newsfeed into something like a zebra print, psychedelic carousel that links, quashes then rehashes ‘moves’ for Isco /  Sneijder / Lamela / Rabiot / Pastore / Draxler / Eriksen / Gotze / Vazquez / Witsel – you get the point. The biggest problem is that at least four of those players have never even played at trequartista.

I simply cannot wait for this unbearable, spinning mercato quagmire to stop and to get my first glimpse of the new Juve 4-3-10-3 formation.

Good luck to Angelo Ogbonna too as he begins his tour around those unmistakably famous English stadiums. Chances are, he probably doesn’t know the difference between The Emirates and Wembley. To prove my point, the big man seemingly still doesn’t know if he kicks with his left, right, both or neither feet…his new coach Julian Dicks should be able to relate to that though.

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Roma
Walter Sabatini’s winter mercato holocaust involved Roma swapping a goal a game striker for a fringe Cagliari forward (with a similar strike rate to Leo Bonucci) and a lumbago afflicted Bill Cosby look-alike from Ivory Coast via Russia (and now back).

His work started off very well by selling a midfielder to AC Milan, who could not make the team’s starting eleven, for €20m. Sabatini’s then went on to clearly enhance the club’s attacking options with Mohamed Salah and Edin Dzeko but perhaps this has left them top heavy and imbalanced.

One must remember the perennially oiled (and indulged) chosen one, Francesco Totti, must have his surly way and will surely not just evaporate like those back-heels to the invisible man he has specialised in for the past seven decades. With just over 24 hours before the start of the season, Roma have left themselves with four registered senior defenders (two dubious Greeks and two Brazilians with varying kinds of head issues) and not enough young Italians to fill the ‘homegrown’ quota. The late, indiscriminate scramble to fill those departments has now commenced. The question remains: are they the new Inter?

*Another chapter in the never ending story of Anglo-Italian, association football cultural exchanges has been written in the eternal city. MC Asher Cole is following in the illustrious footsteps of Jimmy Greaves, Lee Sharpe, Des Walker, Andrea Silenzi, Marco Materazzi and Christan Panucci (amongst many others) in making a sharp ignominious exit. In most cases these two famous, storied (and insular) football obsessed cultures mix like water and oil. In the aforementioned Ravel Morrison we must now place our collective faith, err, best of British!

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Napoli
Along with the return of Pepe Reina, holding onto Gonzalo Higuain would seem to be Napoli’s best mercato move. Even the prolific Higuain, though, would appear to be becoming erraticly unreliable, and this writer puts that down to premature balding. No doubt it made the once ‘hotshot’ Giampaolo Pazzini a questionable quantity overnight and we can only collectively hope Gonzalo goes down the Wayne Rooney and Bono route before all is lost.

On the subject of Pazzini, Hellas Verona have magically moved to pair him with Luca Toni in the most expansive and mesmerising strike partnership since Gigi Del Neri paired Toni with Amauri at Juventus. “Pazzo” should jump up onto Luca’s broad shoulders and recreate Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

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On second thoughts, Napoli’s best mercato move was made before it even opened, in cutting away the biblically comical “Rafa” Benitez. Benitez remains one of life’s constant enigmas in his new position. As if signing Kovacic when you have Kroos, James, Modric and Isco was not bloody baffling enough.

Special agent Benitez may be responsible (if the stories coming out of Spain are true) for Juventus finally exporting hopelessly inanimate Groot himself, Fernando “Forestation” Llorente. Has Rafa worked out he’s the coach of Real Madrid and not Rayo Vallecano?

As we speak I’m contributing to the Carpi and Frosinone online crowd funding initiative with my old foreign currency, back of the couch moulded coins and milk bottle tops. The wait is almost over, we don’t have to pretend to like women’s football anymore, though perhaps the success of this summer’s women’s World Cup will inspire Milan’s delicate captain, and Olive Oil impersonator, to break into a slightly brisker jog and aim passes at some teammates, perhaps………..?

Forza Italian football, really it’s been too long!

By Federico Martone

 

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