The feeling at their home stadium was anything but joyful on Saturday afternoon. The home side was losing against Torino, a team that had conceded ten goals while scoring only two in their previous five league matches. Fans from the Curva Nord were concluding their ongoing dissent in an ongoing feud with president Claudio Lotito.
A Season Falling Apart?
Had their campaign unraveling, or had there never been any cohesion maintaining its structure from the beginning? They reappointed Maurizio Sarri to lead the team this summer, before he to later acknowledge that the management had failed to disclose the transfer ban they were about to receive for accounting issues. Speculation that he might quit were not true, but he did say that Lotito had "deceived" him.
The Roman club were just as chaotic during matches as off the field, defeating Verona 4-0 and Genoa 3-0 but being defeated in their other opening fixtures, featuring the derby della Capitale. From one game to the next, it's been difficult to tell if they're getting better or self-destructing.
Cancellieri's Surprising Presence
At least one man kept smiling throughout. Matteo Cancellieri had not been expected to remain with Lazio this year. He spent last season at Parma as a loanee and, at the start of the off-season, Lazio were attempting to stay there a while longer. The transfer ban necessitated a reconsideration. The club couldn't risk to thin their squad with no new signings.
He joined originally when Sarri was last in charge, then a 20-year-old product of Verona's academy. He accumulated 20 league appearances in Lazio colors in that campaign, the vast majority of those as a substitute. The club's longtime sporting director, Igli Tare, who departed after that campaign, would later accuse Sarri of "informing all Cancellieri would be a star only to bench him consistently."
Discovering His Natural Fit
It's possible the coach was persistently working to determine the exact type of the player's talent. Billed as an attacking winger on arrival, Cancellieri yet was deployed for the majority of that term as an ineffective backup to Ciro Immobile in the striker role. In 63 appearances while playing for Empoli and Parma during recent campaigns, he scored seven times. Shoehorn
