Roma on the field on Easter Monday to confirm progress
It will be a strange Easter of work for the Roma players, also on the pitch this morning (12 noon) for the finishing training and then running to the station in the afternoon for the departure for Naples. And it will be an anomalous Easter Monday for them and for the fans, the (not many) non-residents of Rome who will be able to enter the Maradona, and all those who will see it on TV (kick-off at 19 Dazn commentary). After the fantastic evening of the cup, Roma plunges back into the championship, with an additional worry. Mentally it will be necessary to retune on the needs connected to the achievement of a (non) objective, the fifth place, which becomes so only from the point of view of a rational technical evaluation that has matured the conviction that it will not be possible to fall within the four, and so we seek the stimulus to win the championship of the others.
But it will not be easy to maintain the standard expressed on Thursday. Suffice it to say, you could face every friendly as if it were a Champions League final, but that’s not the case. Let’s put it in reverse: Roma will leave the Maradona lawn tomorrow with their head held high and the pride of having made another great performance, a non-commissioned officer even from what the result will be, then we can really consider the process of maturing on which Mourinho has been working for almost a year.
Waiting for the Giallorossi, who will play for the first time tonight with the unprecedented combination of the white T-shirt with red shorts, will be an old friend, Luciano Spalletti, engaged in a championship race that just in the last performance, seven days ago at home with Fiorentina, he suffered a sensational and unexpected stop. So now he finds himself chasing pursued by Juventus, but yesterday stopped by Bologna.
Napoli is almost full, Spalletti has out of Di Lorenzo and Petagna, he showed off a young and promising right-back, Zanoli, he relaunched some Juan Jesus in the game, he imposed the other former Giallorossi Mario Rui as the owner, but he is undoubtedly suffering from the not very brilliant season by Insigne. Tomorrow evening Lozano should concede on the right wing with Zielinski to take care of supplies for Osimhen. The confrontation between the center forwards of the two teams is another element of interest in the challenge. They have similar structure and enthusiasm and undoubtedly represent the main reasons for enthusiasm for opposing defenses. Abraham has already scored 24 goals this season, eight more than the Nigerian who is 12 in the league (Tommy is 15) and has scored 4 in the Europa League (Tammy 8).
Mourinho and Spalletti are instead in the sixth match, the Portuguese has never lost yet. Roma’s tradition against the Tuscan coach is also good: for him the score is just four wins, seven draws and nine defeats. Curiously, Roma arrived in the first leg match back from 6-1 against Norway against Bodø / Glimt. In the end it was 0-0 with a couple of important chances on each side and with a little too much nervousness: so in the end the referee Massa was forced to send both technicians off. But then Mourinho had some valid reason to be worried, now he really seems more peaceful.