Lega Serie A – General Discussion

[Jocksboy]

This week's top five:
1. Ibrahimovic (Milan) 7.86
2. Dennis (Atalanta) 7.21
3. Ilicic (Palermo) 7.21
4. Bojan (Roma) 7.14
5. Di Natale (Udinese) 7.07

[RomaShield27]

Serie A and Nike extend ‘major deal’
– 10 November 2011 | Posted in Sponsorship, Soccer, Europe | By Michael Long

Italy’s Serie A has announced that sports equipment giant Nike will continue as its official ball supplier in all competitions until 2015.

The deal marks a three-year extension to an initial agreement signed in 2007. According to sponsors.de, Nike is likely to be paying somewhere in the region of €4 million per year to the league and supplying an additional €700,000 worth of balls.

Serie A president Maurizio Beretta called the partnership “a major deal”, and added that it “has been supported by all 20” of the league's clubs.

Nike also currently supplies balls to the English Premiershit.

[RomaShield27]

The manager of the last team to win back-to-back European Cups is changing the way Italy's youth learn their trade

www.guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 November 2011 09.01 GMT – Paolo Bandini

"I don't know." It is the honest answer to the inevitable question for Arrigo Sacchi, the one he might have been asked 1,000 times since May 2009 – when Pep Guardiola's Barcelona confirmed their arrival as Europe's predominant force by swatting aside Manchester United in the Champions League final.

Sacchi's Milan, the last team to win the European Cup in consecutive years, had previously been held up as the benchmark of footballing excellence – the 1989-90 vintage named as the best club side of all-time by World Soccer in 2006. But could even they have stopped Lionel Messi and company?

"What I would say is that, thanks to teams like Ajax, Milan and now Barcelona, football is a sport which has evolved and consequently it remains compelling," says Sacchi, stalling, but behind the trademark, aviator-style, reading glasses his mischievous eyes betray him. Sacchi is too modest a man to be drawn into bold claims but he is also too proud to let his teams be talked down. The suggestion that his old-fashioned 4-4-2 might prove too rigid against Guardiola's more flexible schemes draws a more pointed response.

"No. It is not a question of 4-4-2 or 4-2-1-3, it is a question of having a team which is ordered, in which the players are connected to one another, which moves together, as if it was a single player," he interjects even as the question is being asked. "Today few teams know how to do this. Few teams work as a unit – few, really few teams. They are all made up of little groups. There is no great connection, nor a good distribution of players around the pitch.

"Barcelona has this. You saw it against Manchester United [in this year's Champions League final], this was the big difference between the teams. One was very much a unit, all 11 players were moving as if they were one. The other was moving as individuals who happened to be in proximity to one another. That Milan team was a team who moved well, with the players very closely linked to each other. It would have been a great game against Barcelona, between two great teams."

Despite his initial reticence, it is clear that it is also a hypothetical match-up on which Sacchi has mused before. He insists that no special ruse would be necessary to restrict Messi ("We dealt with Diego Maradona") and that his compact formations – in which the gap between the defensive line and the attack was often 25 metres or less – would not necessarily be undermined by modern interpretations of the offside law (a subject discussed in Jonathan Wilson's recent fantasy match-up between the two sides). "You just need players who know how to read the game," he says.

Indeed, to witness the enthusiasm with which the 65-year-old discusses the game it is easy to be drawn into wondering whether he ought not still to be out there, putting his theories to the test. He thumps his fist into the table as he lays out his vision of how the game should be played, espousing total football concepts of a team who attack and defend as one. "You see defenders today who follow an opponent everywhere," he protests in one of his more heartfelt monologues. "The defender's point of reference should never be his opponent but a team-mate."

Yet it is not by chance that Sacchi has been out of management since 2001. For starters, and despite his belief in the value of the team over the individual, he would never again achieve similar success after leaving behind a Milan team who featured Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit, Paolo Maldini and Frank Rijkaard. Although he took Italy to a World Cup final in 1994, their performances failed to capture the imagination and the sceptics argued that only Roberto Baggio's genius had carried them so far. Euro 1996 proved disastrous and stints back at Milan and Atlético Madrid went little better.

More importantly, though, his body could simply no longer stand the strains of being a manager. Sacchi's final managerial appointment, at Parma, lasted 23 days before he was forced to move upstairs on account of stress-related illness. The same passion that has him hitting the table eventually proved overwhelming as a full-time tactician.

Instead, after several years as a director at Parma then Real Madrid, he moved into television and radio punditry. Then, in August, a new opportunity arose. Following Italy's inglorious group stage exit from the World Cup the Italian Football Federation had identified a need for complete reform of the national set-up. Sacchi was invited to oversee an overhaul of the youth sector, while his former Italy player Baggio was given similar responsibility for reinvigorating the famous coaching school at Coverciano.

What Sacchi found in Italy's youth teams disgusted him. "I see kids who are 14 or 15 years old who are already specialists. But football is not a sport of specialists," he says. "I was watching the under-15s the other day – 14-year-old boys – and the central defenders arrived and all they did was mark their man. They took themselves out of the game. This is suffering, this is not joy, this is not football. If someone does just one thing over and over, they will get better at that thing. But is football just one thing?"

But while he is anxious to change such a culture it will, by his own admission, take time. Sacchi's aim is to recreate a model for the national team along the lines of Barcelona, where every age group is taught using the same tactical approach and the same fundamental ideas about how the game should be played. "When I arrived every coach was just doing what he wanted," he says. "These kids were not getting continuity in their teaching."

But to achieve such goals a new generation of coaches is required and it is here that Sacchi's most radical and most strongly held beliefs come to the fore. Having never gone higher than the amateur ranks as a player, Sacchi believes fiercely that it is time football opened itself up to the idea of more non-footballers becoming coaches, citing the examples of José Mourinho and Zdenek Zeman as supporting evidence. As he famously put it when questioned during his own coaching career: "I never realised that to become a jockey you needed to be a horse first."

Sacchi had been able to enrol at Coverciano after five years working with the Cesena youth team but in Italy even roles such as that one are often inaccessible to people from outside the game. "In Italy they have still not opened up the registrations," says Sacchi. "I would let everyone – from pharmacists to porters – any person – become a manager. This way, in my opinion, we will end the domination of a single way of thinking. Instead we will have a thousand different ways of thinking. The more thoughts you have, the more you can grow."

And Sacchi certainly believes that Italy have a lot of growing left to do. Cesare Prandelli's success in steering the national team through the Euro 2012 qualifiers without a single defeat prompted triumphant headlines heralding a nation's footballing revival but Sacchi is more circumspect. Real gains must come from the base, not from a handful of good results achieved by a select few. There is a tendency among observers to react only to what is happening right at this moment, to "sail by sight", rather than looking further ahead.

"When you build a skyscraper, you make really strong foundations – if you don't make the foundations you will never see the skyscraper," he says. "If you build a shed, you don't need those foundations but it will never be an important building. Prandelli is doing a great job in difficult circumstances. But in the end the national team is only ever the last beneficiary of whatever work has been done at the outset. If something starts badly, it will not end well."

The same could be said of club football in Serie A, where the need to produce immediate results has led to a suspicion of youth. "When teams lose two games they sack the manager," says Sacchi, noting how fans will even go so far as intimidating the directors in order to affect a change of coach. "There is a great tension, a great pressure from the press but even more from the fans, a great violence."

Despite efforts to clamp down on such behaviour, it does persist. Just last season a group of Cesena Ultras vandalised a club shop where the wife of the owner, Igor Campedelli, worked, threatening to come back and do much worse if he did not fire the manager, Massimo Ficcadenti.

Campedelli, no shrinking violet, responded in kind, warning that, if anything similar happened again, he would "sell the team's best players and not register the team with the league [for the next season]". But others have proved less bold in the face of such anger.

Sacchi's hope is that Uefa's plans for financial fair play may provide at least part of the solution – forcing clubs to employ a more rational, finances-led assessment of a situation. "It is clear that debts take away calmness, planning and serenity from the clubs. And so the only things that will grow are violence, arrogance and hysterical reactions. I also hope it may get rid of all of those people who involve themselves in football not because they love the game but for other ends and who bring with them only arrogance, ignorance and incompetence."

Sadly one suspects that last hope may be a wish too far. Then again, before someone came up with the right foundations, even that skyscraper seemed like an impossibility.

[AS Collie]

Silly idea, but whatever. His book is good.

Jonathan Wilson: Barca 2011 vs Milan 1990

Ask anybody who's done it, and they'll tell you that sustaining success is much harder than achieving it in the first place. The great Hungarian coach Bela Guttmann refused ever to spend longer than three years at a club because he felt that after that he could no longer motivate players. It may be that in the modern world of soccer in which money begets money, success is easier to sustain than previously, at least on a domestic level. On a European scale what that means is a cluster of perhaps eight or so super powers constantly battling for the Champions League, which is surely the main reason no side has successfully defended the title since the AC Milan of Arrigo Sacchi in 1990.

Should Barcelona win the Champions League this year, though, it would have good claim to be the best side since Sacchi's. It won the competition in 2009, and may have done so again last year had the prohibition on flights after the eruption of the Icelandic volcano not forced the squad to travel by bus to Milan to face Internazionale in the semifinal. Even after a 3-1 defeat, it took a defensive performance of extraordinary resilience -- and good fortune -- from Inter to withhold Pep Guardiola's team in the second leg.

Sacchi's Milan fell apart soon after its second European triumph, the demands of his pressing game and the difficulty of retaining the hunger necessary to enact it eventually becoming too great. Given Guardiola's transition over a mere three seasons from sprightly ex-player to haggard coach, and his cryptic pronouncements about leaving the Barca job and moving to Italy, it's tempting to wonder if he is finding the maintenance of a great side, constantly stoking its desire, just as taxing as Sacchi did. With their insistence on pressing, both sides play a peculiarly demanding form of football, and one to which outsiders find it difficult to adjust. Neither coach could freshen up a squad by simply going out and signing a new player and expect them immediately to settle.

But what would happen if the teams played each other? Both probably produced their greatest displays in beating Real Madrid 5-0, Barcelona earlier this season; AC Milan in the European Cup semifinal in 1989 (both, oddly, also drew 1-1 in the Bernabeu the same season). So let's take the lineups from those two games and pit them against each other.

AC Milan: Giovanni Galli; Mauro Tassotti, Franco Baresi, Alessandro Costacurta, Paolo Maldini; Roberto Donadoni, Frank Rijkaard, Carlo Ancelotti, Angelo Colombo; Ruud Gullit, Marco Van Basten

Barcelona: Victor Valdes; Dani Alves, Carles Puyol, Gerard Pique, Eric Abidal; Sergio Busquets; Xavi, Andres Iniesta; Pedro, Lionel Messi, David Villa

Milan had Giovanni Galli in goal and a back four of, from right to left, Mauro Tassotti, Franco Baresi, Alessandro Costacurta and Paolo Maldini. Frank Rijkaard and Carlo Ancelotti held the middle of midfield with Roberto Donadoni to the right and Angelo Colombo to the left, with Ruud Gullit playing just off Marco van Basten in a classic 4-4-2. Barcelona, meanwhile, had more of a 4-1-2-3 shape: Victor Valdes in goal. Dani Alves and Eric Abidal surged forward from fullback, with Gerard Pique and Carles Puyol as the two center backs. Sergio Busquets held at the back of the midfield, with Xavi and Andres Iniesta just in front of him, while Lionel Messi operated as a false nine, allowing David Villa and Pedro to cut in from wide positions.

Both sides self-consciously pursue the same philosophy of soccer; Sacchi evangelized the Total Football Dutch teams of the seventies, while Guardiola was captain of the Johan Cruyff-coached Barcelona Dream Team (1991-94) that espoused the same theories as the Netherlands and Ajax sides Cruyff had captained. The difference was in the shape, and that may be conditioned by era.

Sacchi's Milan could afford a 4-4-2 because it pressed high up the pitch, the high offside line (Sacchi's ideal was 25 meters from center back to center forward) squeezing the space and preventing the opposition having time on the ball. The liberalization of the offside law has made such a high line impossible, and any side that doesn't play an additional man in the center of midfield struggles to control possession. If this imaginary game is being played under modern rules, Sacchi's side immediately has a problem.

Then again, Barca is not used to sides that press as hard or as high as Sacchi's, and when Milan do win the ball, Colombo and Donadoni give Dani Alves and Abidal a dilemma. Do they press on as they would usually to, providing attacking width and overlapping the inverted wingers, or do they try to deal with the potential attacking threat? The evidence of this season has been that Barca's fullbacks tend to push on regardless, and that could mean a steady supply of crosses to Van Basten, an excellent finisher of aerial chances.

Messi's drifting, such a problem for so many sides, shouldn't present Milan with too much of an issue, given its offside line should compress the space available to him, forcing him into the area occupied by Ancelotti and Rijkaard. The concern for Milan would be that if any of Xavi, Iniesta and Messi do have even a fraction of time on the ball in a central area, they could feed angled balls through for Pedro or Villa to cut onto from wide. Part of the idea of pressing is to panic the opposition into hasty passes, but even when those three are under pressure, the suspicion must be that eventually one would find the killer pass, particularly given the changes in the offside law that make it easier for Villa and Pedro to time their runs.
Of course, a version of this fixture did occur in 1994, when Cruyff's Dream Team, the clear precursors of this Barca, met a Milan side remodeled by Fabio Capello in the Champions League final. On that occasion, Milan thrashed Barca 4-0, whose two fluid forwards, Hristo Stoichkov and Romario, found themselves squeezed out of utility by a combination of the Milan back four (even though it was significantly rejigged that night because of injury) and Marcel Desailly sitting deep in the midfield. Dejan Savicevic, meanwhile, ran wild, drifting from a nominal center forward's position into the spaces behind the Barca fullbacks.

Gullit, perhaps, could do something similar in this game and, while a great strength, the flanks are certainly where Barca look vulnerable, but the liberalization of the offside law must work in the modern team's favor. Sacchi's Milan was a team that favored position on the field over possession, but with opponents able to wander behind its back four without being called offside until they were interfering in a material way, it's hard to see how it could ever achieve that control. Barca, inevitably, would dominate possession, and then it would be just a question of when one of their playmakers pierced the offside trap.

It's a little unfair, because under the old law Milan would have a far better chance. Under the modern interpretation, though, I'm saying Guardiola's Barca to win 2-0, both goals coming from the sort of chance it created against Arsenal in the first half of the first leg at the Emirates this year -- angled balls played to forwards running in from wide.

Jonathan Wilson is the author of Inverting the Pyramid; Behind the Curtain; Sunderland: A Club Transformed; and The Anatomy of England.



http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/w ... index.html

[Jocksboy]

Week 12 - Top Five:
1. Marchetti (Lazio) 7.64
2. Denis (Atalanta) 7.43
3. Marchisio (Juventus) 7.43
4. Sorrentino (Chievo) 7.29
5. Parola (Cesena) 7.21

[RomaShield27]

Ciao, please see the for news about some new features coming to the site, including our own (like that shit). Also, on a completely unrelated issue, please visit the , grazie!

[Jocksboy]

Top Five this week:
!. Ibrahimovic (Milan) 7.57
2. Mutu (Cesena) 7.57
3. Ilicic (Palermo) 7.50
4. Denis (Atalanta) 7.43
5. M. Rigoni (Novara) 7.14

[Jocksboy]

Week 14 Top Five:
1. Ibarbo (Cagliari) 7.64
2. Lavezzi (Napoli) 7.50
3. Rocchi (Lazio) 7.50
4. Diamanti (Bologna) 7.43
5. Jovetic (Fiorentina) 7.29

[Jocksboy]

This week's top five:
1. Klose (Lazio) 7.79
2. Diamanti (Bologna) 7.41
3. De Rossi (Roma) 7.36
4. Di Natale (Udinese) 7.36
5. Mutu (Cesena) 7.21

[RomaShield27]

Good article on 'Serie A's Best Readers Of The Game':

http://www.whoscored.com/Blog/dk7x8iytb ... f-The-Game

[RomaShield27]

Interesting article here analysing ratios of Italian youth players and foreigners in Serie A:

http://www.drrossoneri.com/2011/11/29/i ... -children/

[red]

What point is the guy making?

That there are talented players who aren't getting to play or that Italy isn't producing talented youngsters at the moment?

[RomaShield27]

Well, I think its more a rant about the youth of Italian football not been given a fair chance and how clubs aren't as willing to play them. Whether thats because there isn't the same talent coming through or not I'm not so sure about.

[AS Collie]

[Jocksboy]

Week 16 Top Five:
1. Pepe (Juventus) 7.29
2. Di Michele (Lecce) 7.29
3. Lodi (Catania) 7.21
4. Thereau (Chievo) 7.14
5. Lamela (Roma) 7.14

[RomaShield27]

WhoScored's Serie A Team of the Season (so far) - yfrog.com/khhjywp

[red]

Lichtsteiner has been the best right back in Italy by miles this season.

[RomaShield27]

Yeh I could probably go along with that, even if he is a horrible, diving, distorted, whining, sister-raping cocklord. He has been quite effective going forward and strong at the back.

[red]

He certainly doesn't come across as a pleasant fellow.

[Jocksboy]

Week 17 Top Five:
1. Marilungo (Atalanta) 7.79
2. Bizzari (Lazio) 7.79
3. Pandev (Napoli) 7.64
4. Alvarez (Inter) 7.36
5. Cavani (Napoli) 7.29