Roy of the Rovers never found much of an audience in Italy. Perhaps that is just because nobody ever thought to translate it, although one suspects that people on the peninsula might not have taken kindly to the cartoon’s routine depictions of their teams as being packed with cheats and complainers.
Or maybe Italian football fans just never needed a comic book hero to fire their imaginations. After all, they had the real thing right there in front of them.
Francesco Totti, like Roy Race, plays in red and gold. Both are one-club men who became captain of the teams they supported as a boy. Each boasts a chiseled jaw and a dry sense of humour. Most of all, though, what they share is a knack for writing themselves into the most improbable of storylines.
What happened at the Stadio Olimpico on Wednesday night was not quite up there with the overhead kick that Race scored to win the 1964-65 Intercontinental Cup against Bagota, a match that he and his team-mates almost missed following a jungle kidnap. But it was not all that far short.
The week had begun with questions over whether Totti was finished at Roma. To an extent, they had been hanging in the air all season, with the Giallorossi thus far declining to renew a contract that will expire in June. An apparent deterioration of the player’s relationship with manager Luciano Spalletti, however, made it seem that the end could come even more swiftly than envisaged.
Totti had rescued Roma on Sunday, scoring a late equaliser off the bench against Atalanta. But in the changing room afterward, Spalletti was said to have torn into his captain for “going around the [team hotel] rooms playing cards at two in the morning”.
Reports of a physical altercation were denied, but video footage of Spalletti and Totti joking together during training on Monday – dropped not so subtly into a montage on the club’s website – felt decidedly stage-managed. Afterward the forward told journalists that they were going for dinner together, but only in jest.
Right from the moment Spalletti was appointed, rumours have swirled that he was chosen as the best man to phase out Totti. The manager is by nature hard and unyielding, but had also built up plenty of goodwill during his previous four-year stint at the club, twice winning the Coppa Italia.
It was Spalletti who famously reinvented Totti as a false nine, leading to his most prolific season in 2006-07. Nobody could accuse the manager of failing to recognise Totti’s qualities, and so his opinion should also be respected when it came to deciding when the player’s time was up.
Except, things could never be that simple. Totti is more than a footballer in Rome, a man whose birthday is celebrated by true believers with the words “Happy Christmas”. Gazzetta dello Sport devoted its front three pages on Wednesday to the phenomenon of “Totti-ism”, asking earnestly if this was a “philosophy or an illness”.
Spalletti has sought to present himself as the calm counter-point to Rome’s excesses. He described the city on Sunday as “a bit of a temptress”, noting that “you can lose sight of the work that needs to be done in the right way”.
It felt like another dig at Totti and his late-night socialising. The player found himself back on the bench for Wednesday’s home match against Torino.
Spalletti might have preferred to leave him there for the whole evening. There was a strong case to be made for Totti’s introduction early in the second half – when the Giallorossi found themselves a goal down and struggling to carve out any scoring opportunities – but Spalletti instead threw on Edin Dzeko, notwithstanding the fact that the Bosnian had missed a string of chances against Atalanta three days earlier.
Roma equalised through a Kostas Manolas header, but then fell behind again to a Josef Martínez goal a quarter of an hour later. Even now, with his team losing at home and desperately in need of goals to keep their Champions League push on track, Spalletti hesitated. There were 10 minutes left when Torino scored their second goal, and yet only four by the time that the manager finally sent Totti on to replace Seydou Keita.
It turned out to be more than enough. Totti needed just 22 seconds to equalise, jabbing the ball in at the back post after Manolas had flicked a Miralem Pjanic free-kick into his path. This was the fastest goal scored by a substitute in Serie A all season.
Less than two and a half minutes later, Totti made it 3-2 to Roma from the penalty spot. The award had been highly questionable, Nikola Maksimovic making no gesture towards the ball that struck his arm but none of it mattered to Er Pupone, who dispatched the ball into the bottom left hand corner of the net.
What followed was pandemonium, Totti screaming “I love you Ilary [his wife]” into a TV camera as team-mates piled over him and grown men burst into tears in the stands. Spalletti simply laughed, before turning back and strolling back toward the dugout with a pensive, almost solemn, look on his face.
His comments at full-time were measured, praising Totti, “who has not trained this hard for seven or eight years” while refusing to go overboard. Spalletti said that he was “happy if Totti is doing what makes him happy” and that he would be content to coach him for another year, but also acknowledged that managing such a player could be difficult.
“The problem is that between what the manager wants and Totti’s history, there are a series of lived experiences that stop this from ever being balanced relationship – and I always get perceived as the bad guy,” he explained. “I pick players to win matches and when I need to think about a full 90 minutes, that changes the discussion. In my opinion, he is a player who needs to be used in exactly the right conditions – which is what happened against Atalanta and this evening.”
His arguments were reasoned and persuasive, but this was not an evening for rational thinking. It was a night to revel in the majesty of Totti, of his capacity even at 39 years old to write new improbable new chapters to his career. Never before in his 24 seasons at Roma had he scored twice in a match that he started on the bench.
Nights like these make it easy to see why Totti thinks he still has something to offer. As Spalletti himself observed: “He knows that he can decide a match any time that he has the ball at his feet.”
The same was true of a certain fictional Melchester Rovers striker. Roy Race was still banging in goals into his 50s. In Rome, you might just find one or two who believe that Totti can do the same.
Results: Roma 3-2 Torino, Chievo 5-1 Frosinone, Empoli 1-0 Verona, Genoa 1-0 Inter, Juventus 3-0 Lazio, Palermo 2-2 Atalanta, Udinese 2-1 Fiorentina, Sassuolo 0-0 Sampdoria, Napoli 6-0 Bologna.
Talking points
• There was a point, earlier on Wednesday evening, when I thought I might be leading this column on Andrea Belotti – who opened the scoring for Torino against Roma with what was his 10th Serie A goal of 2016. Only Gonzalo Higuaín has more. On this form, does Belotti merit consideration for Italy’s European Champoinships squad? I still have reservations about him as a player, but confidence and the goalscoring habit are useful assets to have at a summer tournament.
• Inter’s defeat at Genoa has realistically killed off what (slim) hope they had of cracking the top three. They were damaged by a suspension to Geoffrey Kondogbia – who had just been coming into form – but Roberto Mancini’s response, pairing Felipe Melo and Gary Medel together in a ‘double Pitbull’ midfield did not help either. The Nerazzurri have enough technicians in their squad to believe that they are capable of expansive, attractive football. Too rarely has the manager dared to try.
• Napoli thrashed Bologna 6-0 on Tuesday, and as such preserve their five-point advantage over Roma. The Giallorossi would need to win the head-to-head next Monday to have any serious chance of overtaking them and moving into second. It might not be the title race we had hoped for, but it does matter a great deal for both clubs. Enough Italian sides have failed to navigate the Champions League playoff round to know that it is worth avoiding.
• Juventus won again (of course), ending Simone Inzaghi’s 100% record as manager of Lazio with a comfortable 3-0 victory. The Bianconeri, who had 12 points after 10 games, are almost certainly going to finish this season with more than 90.
• A huge, huge win for Udinese at home to Fiorentina – which essentially means that it will be two out of Carpi, Frosinone and Palermo who join Verona in Serie B next season. Carpi are already leading the way in that particular mini-league, and have a game in hand away to Milan this evening.
• We should probably pause a moment to admire Chievo here, too. Long safe from the threat of relegation, but highly unlikely to find a way into the European places, the Flying Donkeys nevertheless keep soaring upwards – climbing to eighth after they thrashed Frosinone (who did, admittedly, have two men sent off) 5-1 on Wednesday night. I honestly thought Chievo would live to regret selling Alberto Paloschi in January. How wrong I was.
