To say this Christmas will be a gloomy one in Ferrara would be an understatement.
SPAL’s 3-1 defeat to Roma on Sunday left them bottom of the table with just nine points from 16 games. In that time, they’ve won just twice. They haven’t won in their last nine league games. They’ve picked up just one point from a possible 24 on the road – their worst record since 1960/61.
Leonardo Semplici’s history with the club means he has had enough credit in the bank to maintain the faith of the club hierarchy so far; he led them from the third tier of Italian football to Serie A in the space of two-and-a-half years, before keeping them up for two consecutive seasons.
But something needs to change fast if they are to avoid plummeting back into Serie B.
Above all, they need to find a way of scoring goals. SPAL have found the net just 10 times this season, the lowest total in Europe’s top five leagues, except for Watford.
A brief glance at the sequence of events at the Stadio Olimpico does little to tell the full story. Yes, SPAL were leading at half time.
But that lead came against the run of play after an opening 45 minutes in which Roma had peppered 13 shots at goal, a record for the capital club in 2019.
The comeback felt inevitable; it wasn’t so much a question of if, but when. And SPAL’s problem was that they had no answer to it, no way of getting on the front foot with an attack that poses about as much threat as a newborn puppy.
Petagna has never been a prolific scorer and it’s unreasonable to burden him with the task of scoring the goals needed to keep them up, given his track record.
He may have scored 16 times in the league last season, but that was an outlier given that previously his best seasonal haul in Serie A was five.
One jarring statistic is that SPAL are the only team in Serie A who are yet to score with a header in 2019/20, while last season they led this statistic with 18 headed strikes.
This team badly misses the crossing ability of right wing-back Manuel Lazzari, who left for Lazio over the summer after providing eight assists in 2018/19.
Mohamed Fares was another key player last term and has been sidelined with injury for the entirety of the current campaign.
SPAL don’t have a squad capable of playing to Petagna’s strengths and they simply must invest in January, either in wide players possessing good delivery to supply the striker, or in a more natural number nine who can lead the line and be relied upon to score regularly.
Roma’s well-timed defensive crisis
It would be fair to say that Roma’s defensive crisis came at the right moment.
With Chris Smalling ruled out through injury and Gianluca Mancini suspended, Paulo Fonseca turned to an unusual centre-back pairing of Federico Fazio and Mert Cetin for the SPAL test.
The Turk, who joined the Giallorossi from Genclerbirligi over the summer, has rarely been seen on the Olimpico turf this season and this was just his second start in a Roma shirt.
But in the end, we didn’t learn much about what Roma’s second string defence can offer after a game dominated by the home side.
The goal they conceded came from an error of judgment by Aleksandar Kolarov to give away a penalty, and one of the bluntest attacks on the continent was never going to ask too many testing questions of Cetin and Fazio – despite their success at getting in behind on a couple of occasions.
Source: forzaitalianfootball.com