Journalist
December 16, 2024 (changed at 2.26pm) – MILANO
Marco & Simone, which when said like this would seem like a nineties boy band, are instead a successful challenge to the cliché. They are the strength of commitment beyond skepticism. The Lazio fans imagined a season of tears and blood when in the summer they discovered that Lotito had just got the manager safe with Verona: but never judge a book by its cover, Marco Baroni is taking them to the same heights at which Inzaghi left them ( and then Sarri). Yes, Simone, the Nerazzurri coach who today returns to the old Olympic home and who knows firsthand how to break the chains of other people’s distrust. He succeeded twice, once in Formello in 2016, when the ghost of Bielsa was still flying, and then another in Appiano in 2021, a moment after Conte slammed the door so hard that the foundations of the club shook.
Simone, after all, did what Marco did, he convinced everyone that a humble worker with good ideas could be trusted: he has always remained an idol for the Biancocelesti, from the pitch to the bench, and now he also has the heart of San Siro in his hands . He brought the Nerazzurri back to Europe’s elite and then last season up there, above a star. He would also like a second championship, but this year his rivals have increased. Somewhat surprisingly, there is also her, Lazio, and him, Baroni. “For me it will never be a match like the others, it will be tough,” Simone admitted yesterday on the Nerazzurri’s official channels.
Championship music
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Tonight’s Lazio-Inter is also the unexpected challenge between coaches with a similar style, but with a different path. Precociousness on the one hand, patience on the other. Inzaghi went from the youth team to the nobility of the first team in Rome without starting, Baroni knows the art of the apprenticeship like few others: up and down the province, hard bread for years, exemptions, promotions and salvations. From Pescara to Novara, from Benevento to Frosinone, from Cremonese to Reggina, then the (double) feat at Lecce, the last Veronese miracle and only at 60 years old a “great” one finally all for him: the common trait is the management happy with the locker room, that little extra word said to the players on duty to create empathy. It is a technique that Inzaghi himself has refined over the years. “He doesn’t make a mistake in a pre-match speech…”, he said of Lazio coach Luca Pellegrini, while for years the Inter boys have been repeating in chorus how good Simone is at leaving them free and happy on the pitch.
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This dizzying Lazio plays with a four-man defense and practices ferocious aggression, while Inzaghi reproduced more or less the same Roman orthodoxy in Milan: three-man line, incursions on the wings, exchanges of position and then two strikers to resolve. If in the Nerazzurri ThuLa is the couple engraved in marble, also because there is a void behind Thuram and Lautaro, Baroni has created a curious offensive cooperative: when on social media he writes «you don’t need a few, you don’t need many, you want everyone », it’s because really the various Isaksen, Dia, Zaccagni, Noslin, Pedro, Tchaouna (and also Castellanos, disqualified for this time) take turns bringing grist to the mill. It doesn’t matter, with Marco & Simone there’s always a good game and championship-worthy music.
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