Football Italia: Season 5 – Playoff Heartbreak

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Season Five: More playoff heartbreak!

Heading into the last few games of the season, I found a couple of prospects set for release, but not quite as strong as the group last summer. The youth intake brought about three new faces for the youth side: Luca Palazzolo, Demetrio Mirabelli and Federico Migliori. They’ll join the ranks of a team that is continuing to grow in quality in the hope of being able to provide me with more first team options soon.

When I get to this stage of the season, it’s an exercise of heads down, constant work on tactical ideas and ensuring that I have the best players on the pitch. That makes for alarmingly quick progress between games as I take nothing in of the wider world but it does come at a cost. Sometimes, I cannot see the wood for the trees; sometimes, I get stuck in a bit of a rut and sometimes, I make quite big decisions that have quite big implications on our season.

Following the trends from earlier in the season, nobody really wanted to win the thing, probably with the knowledge that promotion to Serie A does feel like a bit of poisoned chalice, as seen by the teams that are often yo-yoing around between these divisions – with two of them, Pescara and Palermo, coming back down to Serie B next year after just one season away. A series of pretty poor outcomes – where just nothing we touched turned to gold: 1.15xG versus Modena but zero goals, 2.04xG versus Cremonese but only one goal, 3.27xG against Sudtirol and a late, late headed goal saving us the points – meant that we went into the last game with a lot at stake. Verona played Salernitana knowing that they needed to avoid defeat to go up but knowing that, if we won, we’d join them. We couldn’t win the league if Verona drew because our head to head was 0 wins and 2 losses against them but we would have taken second place if we could beat the inconsistent Venezia side.

That we did not do.

It was languid and tired and, despite 61% of the ball, just far too safe. We had shots and we created chances but we never truly looked like doing enough. Can I blame injuries and fatigue? Absolutely. Can I blame difficulties against opponents who also play three at the back? Yes. But will I? No. We didn’t do enough and I had my head in my hands on 81 minutes as they pretty deservedly took the lead.

Playoffs it was.

And those weren’t much better. Full of praise for a Como side who’ve just been promoted here but we were second best throughout. Again, a late goal in the second leg curtailed some decent attempts at clawing the game back, knowing that a 2-1 win would give us the stupid Italian rule of going through as the higher placed team.

As with last year, we bow out to the team who eventually win promotion and, holding my hands up, cannot say that the form team didn’t deserve it. It’s a huge jump to make consecutive promotions and I do wonder how they’ll get on next year. As for us, we’ve improved our record a little bit, finishing three points better off than last year but conceding six more goals.

Both seasons for us in Serie B have now ended in playoff defeat and it’s now up to me to work out whether we’re getting the label of Italy’s biggest bottlers or just a team who have reached the end of their fitness tether, besieged by injuries with a squad still in the transformation stage. It hurts. Absolutely. But, if you’d have given me the option to take a third season in Serie B where I – if I get things right – could be fighting, once again, for promotion, I’d have bitten your hands off!

This team is special and their performances are matching that 90% of the time. The heads down approach is working and gets me through the last slog of the season but I’ll need to go away, lick my wounds and work out just why we couldn’t capitalise on Verona and Salernitana’s poor form and why we didn’t have enough steam of our own heading into these playoffs.

– – –

In my eyes, squad building is around progressively getting better – whether that is through upgrading the players or upgrading the ability of the players at the club. The former is easier but the latter is something that I’m striving to do. To assist with this, I’ve gone back into my metric tracker and used the averages we made last season to create the baseline. Any player with a green background has achieved the averages set by the rest of Serie B, and any player with a star next to their name has achieved better than the average set by us last time around.

I’m really happy to see that a lot of players have stepped up their games and we’re becoming better at performing the things I want us to do. If you look at someone like Amey, you’ll see that he’s not the kind of player someone who loves stats would like – as he doesn’t appear to do a lot! However, I can assure you that his presence is often enough, as that defender who steps forward, to make entire moves go around him, playing to our strengths. Midfield duo Lucenti (16) and Bellino (12) both have been involved heavily with goal contributions whilst Owusu has once again scored well for us.

There will be some players who just haven’t hit the targets I have set, haven’t had enough playing time or no longer have the pre-requisite amount of quality I require:

With these leaving, I can add €5.3k p/w, potentially rising to over €10k p/w with a couple of hundred thousand euros made from transfer deals, maybe. Gonzalez and Frey haven’t been too happy with their lack of football, despite agreeing to those squad statuses and the remainder are leaving at the end of contracts or, for Verre and Ciurria, are retiring. With Saudi Arabia being the place where players’ careers go to do, I’ve decided to cash in on the sell on clause for Braschi, meaning I can reinvest that amount in a number of things, for example:

• Wage – £58,654
• Scouting and Wage – £50,577
• €1m transfer, scouting and wage – £31,346
• €2m transfer, scouting and wage – £12,115

Add in the returning Riccardo Vinci – who has improved despite not actually doing that well for a poor Catanzaro side – and I have a decent idea of what I need to do over the summer! It’s going to be a fun one!

Forza Biancoscudati!