It ought to have been the most predictable result of the weekend. Fifth-placed Napoli against last-placed Crotone, two teams separated by42 points in the standings and trending even further apart. The Partenopei were unbeaten in five games and fighting for a Champions League berth, while heir opponents had lost 13 out of 15 matches so far in this calendar year.
But every Italian child knows to look inside their Easter eggs for a hidden surprise. “Football is not made up of objective facts,” insisted the Crotone manager Serse Cosmi at his pre-game press conference. “If it was, then we would have no chance.” If it was, then perhaps we would have no Cosmi, whose outsized persona has tended to eclipse his performance in the dugout.
When Crotone hired him to replace Giovanni Stroppa in March, the accompanying media coverage largely skimmed over the question of whether he could rescue them from relegation, presenting him as something more like a nostalgic variety act. Cosmi made an unlikely entry onto the Serie A scene back in 2000, landing the Perugia job at a time when he had never coached higher than the third tier.
Cosmi was appointed by Luciano Gaucci, the maverick club owner who once signed Saadi Gaddafi, son of the Libyan dictator Muammar, and earned international infamy when he threatened to sack South Korea’s Ahn Jung-hwan for scoring against Italy at the 2002 World Cup.
The manager was a character all his own, the son of a boatman who grew up catching fish from the Tiber but now rampaged up and down touchlines in tailored suits and Stussy baseball caps, pulsating with such nervous energy that you feared both he and his outfits might come apart at any moment. He released an autobiography in which he recalled showing porn to players at his first club, Pontevecchio, on the team bus on the way to games.
Cosmi’s status as a cult figure was cemented as he appeared alongside the comedian Maurizio Crozza, impersonating him, on the TV show Mai Dire Gol. Yet in this era, he was achieving noteworthy results on the pitch as well. He led Perugia to consecutive top-half finishes and won the Intertoto Cup, earning the club just its second-ever appearance in the Uefa Cup.
Perhaps it is inevitable that, for many people, the image of Cosmi will forever be that first version: frozen in time. He spent four seasons with Perugia and has never managed such a long stint with any club in almost two decades since. Before Crotone came calling this spring, he had spent eight years outside the top flight and was a surprising choice. Crotone were already eight points adrift of safety, while Cosmi was several years removed from his last rescue act.
His most recent job had been back at Perugia, where he lasted six months, winning four out of 17 games. And yet, Cosmi has given Crotone a spark. After getting thrashed 5-1 by Atalanta in his first game, they bounced back with a spectacular 4-2 win over relegation rivals Torino. Crotone lost their next game at Lazio 3-2, but were level as late as the 84th minute. It was a similar story against Bologna, whom they led 2-0 before falling to another last-gasp defeat.
Napoli ought to have known better than to take them lightly, although a fast start on Saturday may have lulled them into a false sense of security. Lorenzo Insigne opened the scoring and then set up teammate Victor Osimhen with a delicious volleyed assist.
Crotone pulled a goal back quickly through Simy but Dries Mertens’s free-kick made it 3-1 before half-time. The Belgian rattled the crossbar with another shot soon afterwards. Napoli, finally close to full strength after a season of continuous absences, looked capable of scoring again at any moment. Yet Crotone, too, attacked with conviction.
Three minutes after the restart, Simy ran onto a flicked header from Junior Messias, using his 6ft 6in frame brilliantly to shield the ball from Kostas Manolas before poking it beyond Alex Meret. In the blink of an eye, the score was 3-3, Messias pouncing on Nikola Maksimovic’s poor touch and running through to beat the keeper himself.
Napoli were complicit, inattentive in the key moments, but Crotone were making their own luck with a furious commitment to pressuring those two centre-backs. Cosmi’s team line up in the same 3-5-2 shape used often by his predecessor, but the directness of their passing and the focus on getting Messias forward from an inside-right position are clear shifts of emphasis, yielding tangible results.
Cosmi’s enthusiasm for the Brazilian’s talents was clear in his post-game remarks. He insisted Messias could play for any team in Serie A, saying he had been “honestly stunned by this player”. Yet Simy appears to have been impacted even more dramatically by the change of manager, scoring eight times in five games – more than in his previous 24 appearances this season.
Long mocked in Italy for his gangly limbs and sometimes clumsy appearance, Simy found the net more often in the month from 3 March to 3 April than any other player in Europe’s top five leagues. He has climbed all the way to joint-fourth on Serie A’s scoring charts, level with Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
The forward’s transformation has been so dramatic that the Sky-backed football site Ultimo Uomo felt compelled to publish a piece distancing themselves from previous mockery. “We have entered into the ‘post-ironic period’ of Simy,” wrote Daniele Manusia. “A time when we need to start taking him seriously.”
Will there ever be such a chapter for the manager who has invigorated him? Crotone ultimately still lost on Saturday, though it took an unlikely, and superb, left-footed finish from the right-footed Gaetano D’Agostino to seal their 4-3 defeat. The Calabrian club remain bottom of the table and are nine points from safety – one further than when Cosmi arrived.
Relegation, though, was always the likely outcome for a club with a wage bill one-fifth the size of Napoli’s; at least they are now going down with a fight. A team that was averaging fewer than one goal per game has scored 12 in its last five – despite facing three teams with Champions League aspirations in that stretch.
Cosmi has changed in the past 20 years, as people tend to do. Gone are the baseball caps and fitted shirts, and he cuts a calmer figure on the sideline than he used to, though we are speaking here in relative terms.
Football for him might not be a game of objective facts, but you get the impression that the subjective experience of coaching again at this level is one that he is relishing more than ever, even if it is likely to be short-lived.
Quick Guide
Serie A results
Atalanta 3-2 Udinese; Benevento 2-2 Parma; Bologna 0-1 Internazionale; Cagliari 0-2 Hellas Verona; Genoa 1-1 Fiorentina; Lazio 2-1 Spezia; Milan 1-1 Sampdoria; Napoli 4-3 Crotone; Sassuolo 2-2 Roma; Torino 2-2 Juventus
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