Daniele De Rossi has now secured his sixth league win in seven games in charge of Roma, earning early comparisons with Liverpool tactician Jurgen Klopp.
The Giallorossi cruised to another impressive victory under the former midfielder, picking up a 4-1 win over Monza on Saturday after goals from Lorenzo Pellegrini, Paulo Dybala, Romelu Lukaku and Leandro Paredes.
De Rossi’s unexpectedly incredible start at Roma has seen them rise to fifth in the Serie A table, dragging them up from the ninth that Jose Mourinho left them in upon his dismissal back in January. The team now sit just four points behind fourth place Bologna.
When the Giallorossi initially appointed De Rossi, many expected him to be a short-term option to tide over the fans until the end of the season, trying to stifle the tensions after Mourinho’s exit, but his start has pushed many to call for the former midfielder to be given a real chance for next season.
Writing on page 27 of today’s Gazzetta dello Sport, Italian journalist Giancarlo Dotto discussed the work of De Rossi so far in the Roma dugout and compared him to Liverpool’s Klopp.
“I don’t know why, in fact I know it very well, the more the days go by the more the silhouette of the boy from Ostia is imperiously superimposed on that of Jurgen Klopp, another certified crusher of his pupils when they do things, but also when they don’t do them, and it’s about consoling them.
“Daniele is becoming Jurgen to me. A hallucination? No, an overlap full of meaning. It’s not just the overflowing physicality of the two, the way of celebrating, the extroversion of the veins and guts, more brazen in Klopp (in the sense of a face capable of expanding beyond belief).
“It is no coincidence that the Mad Hatter of Stuttgart is often drawn like an expressionist comic. More disturbed, however, underlying and neural, Daniele’s burden always has something that derails him, in the restlessness of his gaze, something that comes from inside him, a permanent storm of the heart.
“The two are empathetic (as old Mou would say, who ended up prematurely, unfairly in his eyes, in the bulletin board of memories), but with a natural empathy, like spring water, which doesn’t fall from any sky, it doesn’t make you value it as if it were a legacy from God when it is given to ordinary mortals.
“Daniele and Jurgen are what they are. Loyal and honest to the point of imprudence. They distrust the flatterers of the first and last hour.
“The two are protected by a subtle sense of humour. Very weak however in even excellent minds. Mourinho himself, but also Guardiola and Conte, not to mention Bielsa, another genius, but one step away from sociophobia.
“All too included in their own totemic canon, unlike Daniele and Jurgen, who were joyfully dispersed in the dust of the world. Two heavy metal coaches, dedicated to a football that loves percussion and aggression. Full of tattoos, or they become tattoos themselves.
“Net of the still evident mastery of Luis Enrique, De Rossi’s footballing destiny will increasingly be in the synthesis of Luciano Spalletti, a game that weaves thickly but only for the purpose of tearing into the sulphurous shortcuts of invention.
“The German is a natural showman, with an emotional stability that the young De Rossi cannot yet have, but he amazed with his ability to combine feeling and reason. In not being swallowed up by one’s mistakes, in recognising them and remedying them with surgical wisdom (see Salerno), without looking anyone in the face.
“They don’t know how to just hug them. They know how to talk to their players. They know how to make them ‘play’, in the sense of making them rejoice. Jurgen Klopp, the Saint of Anfield. An amiable actor.
“He takes Salah, the day he arrives in Liverpool, shy and lost like a gazelle chased by a lion. He takes him home and hugs him so that he almost crushes him: ‘Momo, you are one of us now, you will make us happy, but on one condition, you don’t move from these twenty meters in front, you work as a killer with your little foot as a violinist.”
“And Salah goes from gazelle to lion. De Rossi took the neglected and dispossessed and gave them back their dignity. Those mortified by the Special One, but also the workhorses assigned to the Glory of the Supreme, pawns of an order that exceeded them.
“Pellegrini, Spinazzola, El Shaarawy, Smalling, Zalewski, Svilar. All the others, starting with Dybala, Lukaku and Mancini, didn’t even have time to feel like orphans.”
Imagine using that many words to say so little