The obvious angle to Roma's loss today was that they were done in by none other than Mattia Destro, the man they deemed surplus to requirements a mere four months ago. And while I'm sure many of you are expecting me to harp on that (I am an unabashed Destrophile, admittedly), Mr. Right's heroics are irrelevant to the real affairs of the day; Roma is broken and appears beyond repair.
Thanks to their 2-1 loss to AC Milan this evening, Roma will once again be table watching, hopeful that Inter Milan can play the role of upsetter by defeating Lazio at the Olimpico tomorrow, sparing Roma a second place stay of execution for another week. With 35 matches in the books, you can probably write your own review, but here is version 2(a)(iii) I've developed this season.
Unlike the run of draws in which Roma dominated the stat sheet but still came out fruitless, Milan thoroughly outplayed Roma in nearly all facets of the game, stretching out Rudi Garcia's defense and forcing Roma's attack to shoot from deep, which is the bane of our mutual existence at this point. I love Radja Nainggolan, but if I see one more 25-yarder screamer sail helplessly over the crossbar, I'll pull my own Mohawk out bleached-hair-by-bleached-hair. I get that Roma doesn't have a real center forward, but it's not as if they're bereft of talent; should they really be relying upon a box-to-box midfielder as their sole source of creativity?
But I guess that's what happens when, to borrow a Seinfeld term, you run out of nothing.
I can't take it. This season has absolutely drained me, I can't coax a cogent thought out of my draw-addled brain. At this point, our only point of solace was a Francesco Totti penalty that was nearly saved. The part of me that wants to cut Garcia some Kevin Strootman/Leandro Castan-sized slack is dying by the minute.
I'm not certain who the right man for the job is, but it ain't Garcia. And the site of Davide Astori virtually vaulting Mattia Destro onto the end of Keisuke Honda's cross was enough to convince me that Walter Sabatini should join the Frenchman on the breadline.
But, alas, we have three more weeks before we can pull a collective ‘CTRL + ALT + DELETE' on this version of Roma, so I guess we can look forward to one final rendition of Totti vs Toto next week. Incidentally, Totti is one goal away from 300 (all comps), so let's pray he gets that before this season is through.