An escape from Lazio’s blues

Ian Hawkey, Italian Football Correspondent

• Last Updated: November 04. 2009 8:22PM UAE / November 4. 2009 4:22PM GMT

Sven-Goran Eriksson made his way through the labyrinthine corridors under the Stade Louis II in Monaco and felt he had crossed a small frontier.

“It’s important for a club like ours to win these sorts of trophies because they are new to us,” he explained to journalists from England.

Eriksson’s Lazio had just triumphed in the Uefa Super Cup, beating Manchester United in the early season showpiece of the European season. It followed up their victory in the 1999 Cup-Winners Cup four months earlier.

Eriksson was right to identify that August night, just over 10 years ago, as an important confidence-booster.

Lazio seized the Serie A title for the first time in a quarter of a century by the end of that campaign, by which time he had impressed the English, and their press, enough to be asked to become England’s manager shortly afterwards.

It hardly seems a decade ago that the rest of Europe feared Lazio. They did so not so much because of the football they played, though it could be glorious when a midfield including Pavel Nedved, Seba Veron and a young Dejan Stankovic were combining.

Lazio were frightening then because they spent so much money, bringing through their gates a succession of devastating finishers – Christian Vieri, Hernan Crespo, Claudio Lopez, Marcelo Salas – and building up mega-squads so they could maintain a challenge on all fronts.

The Lazio of the turn of the millennium played at being Galacticos well before Real Madrid decided that they should be setting the records for big spending; Lazio were trying to establish a sky-blue presence among the traditional elite fully 10 years before Manchester City joined football’s big spenders.

A great deal has happened to Rome’s blue club since then. There have been the years tip-toeing along the verge of bankruptcy, following the realisation that the benefactor of the times of bounty, the former club president Sergio Cragnotti, was a little too ready to walk the tightrope of any available credit.

There have been the scandals, too, an abandoned Rome derby because of the threat of violence between ultras aggravating a rivalry that is far older than Lazio’s wealth or debts or those of the club’s fiercest enemies.

There have been periodic reminders of some of the club’s fans’ unfortunate associations with the extreme right, notably the flat-hand salute made by the folk hero centre-forward Paolo Di Canio during another capital collision with Roma.

And then there was Lazio’s involvement in the Calciopoli investigation, when they were found to have been sufficiently complicit in the Juventus-led manipulation of match officials that they were anned from competing in Europe in 2006-07.

That Lazio had qualified for the Uefa Cup then was itself a small miracle, recovering as they were from the wholesale departure of their better players after the Cragnotti money ran out.

That they find themselves in European competition tonight, when they meet Villarreal in the Europa League, is also credit to the careful management of diminished resources last season. Coach Delio Rossi left in the summer, but several of his better players stayed. Alas, Davide Ballardini, Rossi’s successor, has not found the same touch.

In Serie A, Lazio are without a victory since the second weekend of the season, and home fans are protesting vividly.

Last week, fireworks were propelled into the practice ground at Formello, and Ballardini and the director football, Igli Tare, were obliged to confront supporters at the gates and move training to a pitch further away.

The players meanwhile are in ‘silenzio stampa’ refusing to talk to the media and spent the three days before last Sunday’s draw with Siena isolated together outside Rome.

Europe, in such circumstances, can seem like a relief, an escape from the pressure – nowhere more than as a guest in the small town of Vila-real on Spain’s valenciano coast, a welcome change from the goldfish bowl of Rome. Lazio beat Villarreal, who are also at the wrong end of their domestic table, at home a fortnight ago and another victory tonight would all but assure them of progress to the next stage of the competition.

But even then Ballardini can hardly breathe easily.

As Eriksson used to say of the Lazio job: “Most of the fans want you to be doing well in the league, more than in Europe. But, mainly, they want you to be doing better than Roma.”



ihawkey@thenational.ae

Villarreal v Lazio, 12.05am, Aljazeera Sport +7