On 27 October Lazio plays the last match of the day before the ones that will then get all the attention of the public and newspapers: Inter-Juventus 4-4 and Fiorentina-Roma 5-1. It’s the 3pm shift, a vestige of Serie A’s past: sun, clear air, sleepy sensations from post-prandial laziness. Baroni’s team wins easily against a battered Genoa and, just over two months before the start of the championship, the league table begins to smile on them. The points are now 16, just six from Napoli at the top, in the wake of the teams aiming for a place in the Champions League. In the last minutes of the match the 3-0 was consolidated by goals from Pedro and Vecino, signs of a past that never goes away.
In the post-match interviews, the usual perfunctory phrases: we are only at the beginning, you have to think game by game, the championship is long. Marco Baroni has his usual modest look, a little grey, he speaks almost in a low voice, often looking downwards. «We are all ambitious and to do something important we must maintain the level and the desire high», he says in front of the microphones, before leaving there a more grandiloquent sentence than it sounds at that moment: «Positional football is over, now we have to do movement, even outside the area: the kids believe in it and we work on it.”
It’s a strange moment of hubris for a coach so unwilling to indulge journalists, and for a team still recovering from a period of profound renewal. Baroni speaks as if he is simply reporting a message from the front: Lazio are advancing towards the tactical vanguard of European football.
Having arrived at the beginning of November, what we can say for sure is that it is certainly much further ahead than expected. Not even three months ago, Lazio was still at the beginning of a reconstruction process that seemed rather long and difficult. The third coach in the space of a few months, a squad that had lost most of its technical leaders, the summer transfer market entrusted to a new manager for the first time since its planning, after the end of the long Tare era.
A sequence of events that promised to leave some waste. Igor Tudor who surprisingly resigned at the beginning of June. The Biancocelesti fans who, a few days after Marco Baroni’s announcement, took to the streets in their thousands to protest Claudio Lotito. Ciro Immobile who, after a long negotiation with the club, decides to move to Besiktas almost secretly: only one fan manages to meet him at the airport, he bids him a tearful farewell, before asking his permission to hug him.
It seemed like a return to the grayer years of Loti’s experience. Years, that is, of reduced ambitions, of coaches inclined to compromise, of transfer market sessions without sharps, of players sold after exhausting controversies with the club. Could we really talk about downsizing?
It is paradoxical to say this today, but Marco Baroni’s choice seemed to give credence to this question. A coach without great outbursts in the press conference, who in recent seasons had shuttled between Serie B and the lower Serie A, who seemed to have been chosen more for not having batted an eyelid in the face of Verona’s corporate problems last season, than for actually saving the team in conditions that would have been prohibitive for anyone else. The type of coach who is illegible in a press conference, whose intentions are drowned by the pre-packaged rhetoric that those who enter the world of football seem to install by default in their way of speaking.
As soon as he arrived, Baroni used expressions such as “work culture”, “putting the player at the center of the project” – phrases so overused and emptied of their meaning that it was impossible to read anything new into them. How many coaches have you heard say that the most important thing is training during the week? That the first thing is to adapt to the qualities of the players?
Already from the transfer market, however, it could be understood that Baroni’s ideas were much more radical than his speech let on. The arrival of very athletic players in management such as Nuno Tavares, Boulaye Dia and Tijjani Noslin; but also the decision to do without a more thoughtful midfielder like Cataldi, with the risk of adding further emotional load to a team that had already lost most of its references. All things that signaled the intention to completely change course compared to what was done with Sarri. Therefore, build a team based on transitions and pressing, which played more with the help of space than the ball, which had control of the intangible dimension of competitiveness. A team that, in fact, made us think that the positional game was now over.
Baroni took this path with great determination and already at the end of August he managed to find the right solution. In the last match before the September international break, against Milan (Lazio’s first big turning point of the season), we saw the 4-4-2: the idea of focusing on a pair of real strikers like “the Taty” Castellanos and Boulaye Dia, with the midfield duo of Nicolò Rovella and Mateo Guendouzi behind them.
A series of tactical ideas that seem to come straight from the 90s and which, due to the ease with which they have taken root, seem to suggest that football is simple, and that all the sophistication that has arrived in the last thirty years are just useless frills, shadows of the past. “Football has changed”, as president Claudio Lotito said even before this season began, speaking with his usual cynicism about the departure of his former captain Immobile.
It’s not just an impression, actually. On the pitch, Lazio really uses a series of tools that seemed to have been denied by contemporary football. An example: build the game by passing through the side corridors, bypassing the opponent’s pressing rather than forcing yourself to pass through them with the risk of losing the ball in dangerous positions.
“I often tell the team to make a hole in the chain, on the wing, but then when we can change front and fill the area we do it,” said Baroni after the large victory in Como. And that’s exactly what Lazio is trying to do, especially on the right, where Nuno Tavares seems to be a trick to winning games in Serie A. Also for this reason, due to the importance he has in Lazio’s game, the Portuguese full-back has achieved eight assists in eight league games.
It’s not just the talent of Nuno Tavares, though. Baroni’s idea, rather contemporary one might say, is to crush the field not only vertically but also horizontally, which in the possession phase essentially means creating density in the area of the ball, attracting the opposing team from a side, and then hit it with a change of play or with a cross into the area.
The insistence on crosses, in theory, goes against the trend of the path taken by European football. Baroni’s team attacks the area with crosses like almost no other in Serie A, a weapon considered statistically ineffective, and which in his case instead yields excellent offensive data, contributing to the total of 1.49 non-penalty Expected Goals per 90 minutes (only less than Atalanta and Milan) and 3 clear shots which Lazio gets every 90 minutes (only less than Atalanta).
With 12.40 attempts per 90 minutes, Lazio surpasses all the other teams in the league in terms of total number of crosses, and if you take the percentage of total passes into the area (40%) only Udinese – another team that is offensively doing pretty well – doing “better” (45%). For example, Lazio, if you remove crosses, are only twelfth in Serie A for passes into the area per 90 minutes (2.40).
In the 0-2 at Como, the effectiveness with which Lazio attacked the area: Noslin, Vecino and Castellanos who entered, freeing Pedro, Tavares who reached him with a great horizontal pass.
These are difficult figures to explain, especially in light of the fact that Lazio does not have great headers, and that they are partly due to the courage with which the Biancoceleste team fills the area. When the cross is launched, there are always at least four men in the opponent’s area, and the attack in the area almost always starts from the so-called “second line”. In short, you don’t wait for the cross into the area in a static manner, but you arrive at it from outside, in order to prevent the opposing defenders from controlling both the ball and the movements.
Perhaps this is also how another counterintuitive choice is explained, namely that of placing the attacking pair vertically rather than horizontally, and of asking them to come closer to sewing the game not to Castellanos, who likes to play three lines and join with his teammates, but with Dia, who we had known in Salerno for the precision of his movements in depth behind the opposing line. In this way, Lazio loses something in technical precision when they have to move up the field dribbling (which they are interested in doing much less than in the recent past) but they gain in unpredictability in attacking the area, given that Dia can enter it later after contributing to the construction phase.
If Lazio doesn’t attack the area immediately, but their maneuver comes back, it’s Castellanos who tends to come out to participate in finishing the action.
Narrowing the field in the ball area allows Lazio to use other offensive resources. For example, overloading the passing lines with men to use the veil and thus freeing teammates with simple external-internal passes.
Or, discover the weak side of the opposing teams, to exploit the qualities of Baroni’s men in one-on-one situations. Not only Mattia Zaccagni and Nuno Tavares on the left (the latter, with 1.70 successful dribbles per 90 minutes out of 3.28 attempted, is by far the best defender in Serie A in this sense), but also Isaksen on the other side (1.40 dribbles succeeded for 90 minutes out of 3.73 attempted). Only Milan, Parma, Napoli, Juventus and Udinese attempt more dribbles than Lazio, and only Milan and Juventus manage more (7.30 per 90 minutes).
An example of a pass to free the man in the area, with Zaccagni and Dia on the same passing line.
Lazio’s offensive richness is currently also aided by extreme efficiency on dead balls: Baroni’s team is in fact third for Expected Goals created from set pieces (0.40 per 90 minutes) despite being only 15th for shots resulting from this type of situations (2.90 per 90 minutes). It’s a discussion that can actually be extended to everything Lazio does on the pitch, now that they’re experiencing one of those moments in which they seem to be playing a few centimeters off the ground. A sensation that is neither visible nor measurable, and which according to Luca Pellegrini is due to the sensitivity of Marco Baroni: «An empathetic person who understands moments well».
The 4-4-2 helps to narrow the field even without the ball, and similarly to before it does so both horizontally and vertically. It’s quite impressive to see how Baroni’s team accepts taking risks. It is not uncommon to see situations of parity or even numerical inferiority on the other side of the pitch when Lazio tries to recover the ball in the opponent’s midfield, trying to compress the opponent towards one of the two lateral foul lines. This is perhaps the aspect that could potentially make Lazio most vulnerable in the future, especially against opponents who know how to manipulate the opponent with possession. The same can be said of the way he relies on individual duels and crosses, against teams of a superior technical and athletic level.
Baroni’s team tries to crush Juventus on the lateral foul line but the opponent’s possession reveals the numerical parity behind and in the end Romagnoli is forced into a last man foul which will cost him the expulsion.
However, being able to worry about the future seems like a privilege compared to what we could have expected at the beginning of the season, when it was even difficult to say what the seasonal expectations were.
Tonight, at the Olimpico against Cagliari, Lazio has the possibility of going to within three points of first place in the standings, with a full-scoring path in the Europa League, and more than expectations, there seems to be a lack of limits to the imagination. Lazio and Marco Baroni, regardless of how it ends, have already demonstrated something.
