CIRO IMMOBILE got back to doing what he does best on Saturday, sticking the ball in the net twice as Lazio returned from their winter break with a Coppa Italia rout of Novara. He had failed to score in any of his final four appearances of 2018. You could call that a drought, of sorts, but only because we are talking about a player whose recent strike rate has run closer to a goal every game.
He was Serie A’s joint-capocanonniere last season, finishing level with Mauro Icardi on 29 strikes. This despite missing five matches due to a hamstring injury that dogged him from January through to the spring. Without it, he might even have challenged Leo Messi (34 goals in La Liga) for the European Golden Shoe. Across all competitions, Immobile scored 41 times in 2017-18.
Little wonder that his manager should hold him in the highest esteem. Simone Inzaghi places Immobile alongside his own brother, Pippo, as “one of the three or five best attackers we’ve had in Italy over the past 15 years”.
Not everyone would agree with that sentiment. Some might even scoff. Immobile’s numbers have certainly been impressive since he joined Lazio in the summer of 2016, yet does his talent really stand comparison to the likes of Francesco Totti, Alessandro Del Piero, or even Luca Toni?
The reluctance of many observers to afford him such status stems from a failure to deliver in different contexts. Immobile arrived at Lazio via unhappy stints with Borussia Dortmund (three goals in 24 Bundesliga games) and Sevilla (two in eight La Liga matches). More damning in the eyes of most Italian fans have been his failures with the national team.
Immobile was supposed to be the face of a new generation, the No9 around whom a new team could be built in the wake of Euro 2016. Italy had reached the quarter-finals with Graziano Pellè up front, but that was a testament to Antonio Conte’s cussedness and tactical mastery. A fresh start was required under Giampiero Ventura.
Prolific for Lazio, Immobile was a natural choice to lead the Azzurri’s attack. He started brightly, scoring four times in Italy’s first four World Cup qualifiers. And then, suddenly, the well ran dry. Immobile has totalled two goals in 16 appearances for the national team since.
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It is too simplistic to say that the striker was not up to the task. The tale of Ventura’s tenure is one of catastrophic misjudgements – highlighted by the decision to send his team out in an untested 4-2-4 against Spain in Madrid, with predictable results – and mulish obstinacy. Had the manager allowed Lorenzo Insigne onto the pitch for more than 14 out of 180 minutes of the Azzurri’s World Cup qualifying playoff against Sweden, things might have played out very differently.
Still, Immobile must wear his share of the blame. He had chances against Sweden, and especially in the second leg, when Ventura finally allowed Jorginho onto the pitch. The Lazio striker could not take them, and has struggled to seize his opportunities so far under Roberto Mancini as well.
Those have not, admittedly, been abundant. Immobile has played in only three out of nine Italy games under the new manager, although he was chosen to start both Nations League matches against Portugal. Mancini offered a different perspective, however, when he reflected during a press conference this October that: “if you can find me an attacker who scores goals, I’ll put him in”.
Immobile is certainly capable, yet there is something of the ‘Goldilocks player’ about him: a sense that he can only deliver to the best of his ability when conditions are just right. Before coming to Lazio, he had enjoyed prolific seasons at Pescara and Torino, but also mediocre ones elsewhere.
Inzaghi has built a team to suit his specific talents in Rome: developing a rapid, counter-attacking style of play in which the ball is most often funnelled through the middle of the pitch and the striker can expect a steady supply of through-balls. It is a system that makes the most of Lazio’s creative talent: the quick feet and vision of Sergej Milinkovic-Savic and Luis Alberto. But is first and foremost an approach that capitalises on what Immobile does best.
The striker is not, in the context of modern football, a remarkable athlete. He is moderately tall, strong and quick, but not sufficiently so to dominate physically. Nor are his technical gifts supreme.
What he does boast is a capacity for timing a run, finding the space, and finishing coolly under pressure. These sound like simple things, but they are not. The spaces are never as wide as they appear on TV, in an age when centre-backs run like Olympic sprinters.
“Co-ordination is a key factor,” explained Immobile during an interview with Rivista Undici in 2017. “You need to understand where to run and how to finish and do so as quickly as possible. With the rhythms of the game today, it’s unthinkable that you’re going to be able to stop the ball inside the area, take a look and then shoot.”
It is Immobile’s efficiency that permits him to pile up the goals so consistently, allied to a finely-tuned sense of when and where he needs to arrive in order to get on the end of a pass. What is often discussed as ‘instinctive movement’ of great penalty box strikers is in reality the payoff for countless hours of work on the training ground.
Immobile learned much in his one season at Pescara under Zdenek Zeman, a coach who helped to refine his movement on the way to a 28-goal haul in 2011-12. Yet if you ask the player he will tell you that there are plenty more who share the credit, from Del Piero – his idol when he was in the youth team at Juventus (and the man he replaced when making his senior debut) – to the mother whom he credits for his relentless energy.
He also owes a certain something to Naples, the city where he was born and through whose streets he ran chasing a ball as a kid. He remains fiercely attached. Lazio’s game away to Napoli this weekend will be a homecoming for Immobile, who owns a home in the city close to that of his former Pescara team-mate, Insigne.
He makes no secret of the fact that he would have loved to represent his hometown team himself, but on Sunday Immobile will be focused on beating them and sustaining fourth-placed Lazio’s push to qualify for next season’s Champions League. Immobile’s cause will be aided by the absence of Kalidou Koulibaly, serving a one-game suspension. One less obstacle to doing what he does best.
