Palermo v Lazio: Sigh
By: Martha | January 27th, 2007
Alright, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the technical, confident Palermo we saw during the first months of the season was some sort of aberration. The team is still a solid one, but that attacking, one-touch style hasn’t been seen in weeks; it was missing even before Amauri went down. Today they possessed the ball well at the back, but going forward there were a lot of short-short-long combinations in place of the flowing, flexible style the team displayed early in the season. Don’t me wrong — what Palermo are don’t now isn’t bad, it’s just different, and is perhaps as much a product of how teams defend them as anything else. And the long-ball game sometimes worked: Corini played some fantastic passes right onto Caracciolo’s foot (though Caracciolo generally failed to do them justice), and Di Michele had some truly awesome moments on the ball. But they rarely threatened, apart from an offside goal by Caracciolo (off a FANTASTIC bit of individual skill by Di Michele), and it was always going to take a miracle to even stay in the game.
Lazio, meanwhile, transitioned from defense to attack really well, and they periodically displayed the killer instinct that was so obviously lacking in Palermo. Also, I’m becoming fascinated by Valon Behrami. He started again in the departed Oddo’s place and, though nowhere near as solid as he was last week, he’s a fantastic, confident attacking threat who also always manages to get the necessary defensive touch in to end threats. And he’s only 21! Plus, his legs are so long it takes him about four strides to get into the opposing box. Which, you know, is impressive.
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