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At 49 in the second half, Josip Ilicic touches the second ball of his game, shortly after losing the first. In the umpteenth long transition of Roma turned off by the precipitation of its offensive midfielders, the number 72 of Atalanta had tried to come back from the field leading the ball with the left winger already from his midfield but colliding with the context of the match. Ibáñez and Veretout stood in front of him, like two stone statues suddenly coming to life, and Ilicic ended up letting the ball slip off his feet. Roma, however, did not know what to do with the ball and Spinazzola’s sloppy diagonal towards Dzeko quickly turned into a new possession for Ilicic, who had started his new action at an even more remote point of the field, always in his middle but starting. practically from the lateral line of the phallus. A point that for at least a few moments would allow him to play outside the density of the game, as if asking for a moment of silence in a room full of people.
Ilicic advances the ball with his left in, almost limping, then pretends to open with his right towards Zapata to avoid the return of Mkhitaryan, who walks away from the ball with his body. The Slovenian attacking midfielder returns the ball to the front with an imperceptible touch with the right heel, then adjusts it again with the left fielder, twice, to re-enter the field. Around him are five Roma players, who are making density in the area of the ball to recover it immediately, but this time the pass comes directly to Zapata. Ilicic loves to pass the ball through the eye of a needle, and this is the effect it has on people.
Zapata defends the ball with his body and returns it to Ilicic on the run, again in the right fielder, but this time in the opponent’s trocar. Ilicic touches her at a steady pace with left fielder, fueling the wait for his next play. The Slovenian attacking midfielder touches the ball and waits, touches the ball and waits, until out of the corner of his eye he sees Hateboer running like a madman down the middle corridor. Then Ilicic puts his toe under the ball and lifts it up, ushering it between Ibáñez and Spinazzola, who seem to admire this little balloon as if it were a large soap bubble.
Atalanta’s action will come at the feet of Freuler, who, from the edge of the area, will waste all the care that had been taken to get him to that point by shooting him roughly between Malinovski’s legs, but Ilicic still put one thing. clear to your opponents: your plan against me does not work.
In the first half, Roma annulled Atalanta with a cynical but not passive strategy. Aided by Dzeko’s immediate goal, Fonseca’s team had decided to leave the ball to the rival, raising the center of gravity in the positional defense phase to compress the space between defense and midfield. And for a very significant paradox, in this strategy of destruction of the opponent’s game, the two arms of the three-way defense, Mancini and especially Ibáñez, two weaned players from Atalanta and who from the Gasperini system had contributed precisely the aggression to Trigoria. in the man outs to quell the receptions between the opposing lines. The physicality of the two defenders of Roma (in the first half 2 tackles won of 2 and an interception for Mancini; 4 interceptions for Ibáñez) was suffered in particular by the two attacking midfielders, Malinovski and especially Pessina, who had been effectively excluded from the match.
Atalanta had practically never managed to get to Mirante’s goal clean, producing only one shot on goal (from De Roon, in corner developments) and some other dirty action born of a high recovery or opponent’s error and ended with a blocked shot. After the end of the first half, Gasperini’s team had produced just 0.4 Expected Goals, compared to 0.6 for Roma, who instead seemed dangerous to exploit Dzeko’s miraculous game with the back to goal and the consequent deep insertions of the offensive midfielders and the winger.
In this case, for example, Spinazzola shoots long to Dzeko, who drops the ball and leans back for Mkhitaryan. The Armenian attacking midfielder, shortly after, will open again for Spinazzola who, at least for a moment, surprises Hateboer in depth.
However, with Ilicic entering the second half, leaving the ball to opponents and playing in transition became a bad idea. Not only because this plan quickly depleted the physical and mental energies of the Fonseca team, but above all because Ilicic knows how to do everything with the ball. The Slovenian attacking midfielder, as we have seen, put himself in a difficult position to read for Roma, behind Spinazzola, who went off course on Hateboer, but too wide and low compared to the trocar to be taken by Ibáñez, who for picking it up would have to stray too far from the other two central defense stations. In this way, Ilicic could hit the field with a ball and chain, attract an opponent, keep him at a distance with a double step or a feint, and then cut in half with the ball that central density that Roma was desperately trying to defend. .
In a team that makes vertical urgency and physical intensity a belief like Atalanta, Ilicic’s talent stands out even more for the delicacy with which he handles the ball, for the many times prolonged wait at the end of the moment. that will unload the ball. If football is also rhythm, following a predefined time to move around the field and make plays, Ilicic, in Atalanta, is musicality, a dissonance. It seems like a parenthesis but it actually adds something necessary: it makes sense of everything that came before. In a team of desert raiders, Ilicic tiptoes to the intensity of the match, like a man careful not to sink his feet into the sand.
A few minutes before Zapata’s draw, for example, Atalanta had sent the ball off the defense with a series of coded moves, keeping Hateboer anchored to the defense and lifting Toloi to the midline, to overcome pressure from Roma. At that moment Ilicic, who was waiting for the ball in the usual corner between the lateral foul line and the midfield line, advanced dragging the ball forward using his left inside as a hook, trotting down the field as if he did not know. the result. Then, when he got in front of Pellegrini, he took a first double step to return to right fielder, and then another to return to starting position. All of this before easily switching the ball on the other side of the field to Gosens.
But Ilicic’s football is not vanity, or at least not always, and never like yesterday has it been seen how much their mentioned game of tapping is not only necessary for Atalanta, but in a certain sense defines them. In the tie, for example, Gasperini’s team easily reaches the barter with a progression from Freuler, who had entered the gap opened by Pellegrini, who had followed Gosens on the outside. The Swiss midfielder vertically serves Malinovski, who tries to pivot on his left leg to turn in front of the goal, but the movement is too cumbersome, too complex, and Mancini simply stretches his foot to foul the ball, which ends up right in the Ilicic area. , on the edge of the area. Ibáñez immediately shortens him, who seems to have understood how his opponent works and remains reactive on his legs to shoot left or right, where Ilicic usually likes to move the ball with the outside of one of his two feet. On the other hand, the Slovenian attacking midfielder does the seemingly simplest, a vertical step towards Zapata that passes exactly between the legs of Ibáñez, who has just discovered that with certain players it really is not possible. to protect your area. The Colombian striker keeps Smalling’s return at arm’s length and then turns delicacy into violence, throws a bomb under the crossbar and scores his first Serie A goal in nearly a month. When he gets up, Zapata begins to release his adrenaline with a cry as Ilicic already smiles at him with a vaguely melancholic look.
The last time Ilicic scored a goal or an assist in Serie A was on March 1, 295 days ago. Atalanta played against Lecce, under a gloomy sky and in a Via del Mare filled in a way that today horrifies us. Even in that case Ilicic had two assists and a goal, and even in that case he initially led to a Zapata goal. Other than that, however, almost everything seems to have changed since then. The stadiums have been emptied and Ilicic’s has also become the story of an absence. Even if this was not his seasonal presence, before yesterday, between the championship and the Champions League, he had already played almost 600 minutes, that of Ilicic became the story of a comeback yesterday, probably because of the way it is. it happened. Like that game in Lecce, in which Gasperini’s team went from 2-2 to 2-7 in little more time, even yesterday Ilicic’s goals and assists transformed a balanced game into a Nerazzurri avalanche. But although it seemed normal then, something inherent to Atalanta, yesterday, after almost ten months of emptiness, it became clear to us how precisely Ilicic’s delicacy is what makes the violence of Gasperini’s team irresistible.
Yesterday, against Roma, Atalanta with Ilicic on the field achieved 1.7 Expected Goals, more than four times more than what he had produced in the first half (0.4). Of course, the physical deterioration of Roma and Fonseca’s usual lack of reactivity in the changes may have weighed, but it is difficult to underestimate the role it played in breaking the balance of the Ilicic, which in turn contributed to almost half of your team’s offensive production. team in the second half (with 0.24 expected goals and 0.5 expected assists).
The essence of its importance for Atalanta lies in the series of plays with which it prepares the 2-1 that definitively tilts the game for the side of Gasperini’s team. The reception at a closed angle, almost in the line of the lateral foul, the ball dragged forward with the tip of the left, the small trot to the trocar and then the pleasure of passing the ball between three opponents with a pass. Hearing that someone, even in an empty stadium, in front of that ball is left with his mouth open, exhaling an “oooh”.
It is inevitable, however, that the cover for Ilicic’s return will be the incredible goal of the final with the double pass over Ibáñez, the turnaround on Bruno Peres and the pause with which he froze both Smalling and Mirante. In all these cases, the most exceptional part of Ilicic’s game lies in the moments before the play, the way in which he waits for his move so long that it makes it unbearable for the opponents, who end up moving too early or too late. .
When, for example, he repeatedly touches the ball while advancing slowly, while Ibáñez tries in vain to understand his attentions, or when, once inside the area, he simulates the shot once to keep Smalling in place and then touches the ball once with the ball. outside, and then one more time in an even more subtle way, as if he could endlessly do it each time in a weaker way, to cover up the moment when he will shoot at the first post.
In splendid assonance, his return also happened like this: suddenly, after a pause that was both tired and stubborn at the same time, it dragged on longer than we expected, to the point where we thought it would never end. And even if this match in the end won’t be a real comeback but just a flash in the pan, we’ll probably remember it anyway to make us understand exactly how and how special Josip Ilicic is. As if he had to come back to let us discover it again.
