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The Giallorossi Santa Rides Again
With Christmas just around the corner, AS Roma fans have been cheered by the stunning return to form shown by Captain Francesco Totti. The number 10 has battled through a gruelling recovery from serious injury to return to a peak form that many insisted was impossible given his age. Goal.com’s Luca Manes reflects on Totti’s bumpy road to physical recovery – and recovered respect…
His horrific injury last February put his career under a serious threat. Unconvincing performances during the last World Cup and in the first games of Serie A fuelled a lot of criticism on him. But Francesco Totti didn’t give in, and managed to return to his usual standards of play. He’s been a massive one-man boost for Roma, busy trying to catch up with Inter in the quest for Scudetto.
The poster boy for a well known mobile company, Totti is very much present on Italian TV in a commercial where he’s dressed like Santa Klaus. For AS Roma fans, though, his gifts have come earlier, well before Christmas. The biggest present they could get was that their beloved number 10 would score lots of goals again after that terrible injury of last February.
And it’s not only a matter of hitting the net. He’s back to his usual display of great controls and marvellous assists. But at the beginning of the current Serie A campaign quite a few people wouldn’t bet on such an impressive comeback. They had a point, though.
When he suffered a fractured fibula in his left leg following a crude challenge by Empoli’s defender Richard Vanigli, only few thought that his career was in tatters, but many argued that it could be in serious danger. Roma’s skipper worked extremely hard to secure his trip to Germany for the World Cup, just to wipe away bad memories of Korea-Japan 2002.
He managed to play for Azzurri, so at last he became World Champion. To be honest his World Cup campaign wasn’t that memorable. You could tell his form was far from the top. But even tough he wasn’t fit enough he managed to distribute four assists and to score a vital penalty in the last minute of the match against Australia.
Totti’s first games in Serie A weren’t much impressive either. He was too slow, misfiring shots and missing penalties (two in Serie A and one in Champions League). His terrific goal in the home debut in CL didn’t help too much to scrap the impression that he was blatantly below the par.
Given his state of form he can spend more time with his little child and his beautiful wife, somebody hinted with a bit of malice. Totti’ll never be the player he used to be, added a few members of the media, maybe not giving much credit to the rehabilitation programme he was thoroughly attending.
At the same time there was a sort of misunderstanding between Totti and the newly appointed national team manager, Roberto Donadoni, regarding the possibility of the Roma player being employed in the Euro 2008 qualifying games. “I’ll return to play for Azzurri after the steel applications put in my leg to fix it will be removed” those were Totti’s final words, which put an end to a turbulent matter.
And it also made clear that his priority was to concentrate on his “first love”, AS Roma. It’s note a case that in a press conference he stated that “Scudetto in 2000-2001 with the team I’ve always supported was bigger than the World Cup victory”.
Ironically, it was just following a break due to Italy’s international commitments that Totti found his way back. His level of play flourished again. Goals started to roll back. In November Curva Sud idol stormed San Siro with an astonishing performance when Roma faced Milan. His two goals secured a glorious win in Milan after a couple of decades of drought for giallorossi. Since then he hasn’t looked back.
His epic left footed volley in Genoa was saluted with a storm of applause by astonished Sampdoria fans and showed that his left ankle was keeping quite alright after the accident. | 
发表于 2006-12-21 01:28:10
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