It was certainly a night for the record books. What else can you say about Manchester United’s 7-1 destruction of AS Roma at Old Trafford last night? Well, the Italian press had plenty to say, according to the Guardian.
Columnist Candido Cannavo, a self-described Roma fan, was forced to invoke the great Italian poet Dante in his castigation of Roma’s performance. He called the match “an epochal beating that Italian football has never previously suffered at the hands of the English. … Now I run to father Dante to find out what circle of Hell my beloved Roma has fallen into: maybe that of the proud and vainglorious. Conceding three goals in eight minutes could only have happened to a squad that thought it was divine.”
Some pundits tried to point out the key absences of midfielders Rodrigo Taddei, Simone Perrotta, and Max Tonetto, but as Ruggiero Palombo said, those “extenuating circumstances … pale into insignificance when set against a result this mortifying.” Palombo blamed coach Luciano Spalletti for failing to adjust the team’s tactics accordingly: “Redesigning the line behind [Francesco] Totti’s with [Christian] Wilhelmsson, [Mirko] Vucinic and Mancini represented an exercise in vanity. There is no formation that is better than the others if you don’t have the right players.” He said that after United’s “beautiful, but not unstoppable” opener from Michael Carrick, the Giallorossi lowered their guard “like a dazed boxer.”