press, uomo (man on)” and so on.
Smalling believes it is no cliche to suggest
that Italian football is more tactically organised,
with even lower-table sides building their whole
game on defensive solidity. He says that he has
worked more on tactics at Roma than with any
previous club.
Respected figures such as Fabio Capello
and Arrigo Sacchi regularly point out that Italian
teams can be in difficulty in the Champions
League because Serie A football is not played
at the same intense rhythm as, in particular, the
Premier League, but Smalling says: “I don’t know
about that. At times, Italian teams are very street
wise about how to take the steam out of a game
if you are leading, whereas in England we’re
more gung-ho.”
If there has been a dark cloud on Smalling’s
Italian horizon it has clearly come through his
experience of racism or, at the very best, racist
misunderstanding. That happened in December
when Rome sports
daily Corriere dello
Sport published a
preview of the next
day’s Internazionale
v Roma clash under
the headline “Black
Friday”, complete with full-page pictures
of both Smalling and his former United
team-mate Lukaku, who is now with Inter.
Even though Corriere dello Sport editor Ivan
Zazzaroni immediately claimed that the paper’s
intention had been to celebrate the “magnificent
wealth of diversity” in football, that front page
prompted a well-documented international
row, with many in Italy and elsewhere accusing
Corriere dello Sport of clumsy insensitivity.
Remember, this season had already seen ugly
racist incidents at games involving Lukaku and
Brescia’s Mario Balotelli to name but two.
For many Italians “Black Friday” is just a
marketing slogan for a weekend when the IT
multi-nationals hope to sell a lot of smartphones
and laptops. So did Smalling feel that the Black
Friday front page had been a case more of
ignorance and insensitivity rather than racial
hatred? After all, someone – perhaps innocently- had decided to preview the game by focusing
on two of the main protagonists, two men with
much in common: they are former team-mates,
had both done spectacularly well in their first six
months in Serie A and, of course, both are black.
“I was obviously aware of this because such
a big thing was made of it – and rightly so," says
Smalling. “I was more disappointed, and yes, a bit
offended, but it is the sort of thing you see and
you think to yourself, why?
“Surely, things like that should not be printed
in mainstream national publications.”
On the subject of the Three Monkeys in an
anti-racism campaign for Serie A two weeks
later – something that to many seemed blatantly
offensive – Smalling could only conclude this is,
above all, an educational problem, arguing: “I
couldn’t quite believe that, when I saw it first.
I thought it wasn’t for real, given the storm that
had already happened to then go and do that.
“It is a real disappointment, but I think that
a lot of it is down to a lack of education. I would
like to think that is the main driver behind
anyone who intentionally does things like this.”
Education is not a word used casually by
Smalling. After all, he is a rare beast in the
firmament of top-level professional footballers in
that he has three A Levels: in Business Studies,
Economics and Maths respectively. His mother,
who brought him and his brother up as a single
mum following the death of her husband when
Chris was just five, focused much of that
upbringing on school, ensuring that both her
boys studied all the way through to A levels.
The result was that when Chris, already an
England schoolboy international, went for trials
with Fulham and Middlesbrough at the age of 18,
he had been accepted by two universities.
Unlike many of his contemporaries he went
into his trials in a very relaxed frame of mind,
recalling: “Very few people are going to get
a contract at 18 but the fact that I had my A
Levels and university already in the bag meantCHRIS SMALLING
Inter pal...with ex-United team-mate Romelu Lukaku
“Nine times out of 10, Roma should have won
that game”
Smalling on the recent derby game against Lazio in Serie ADerby duel...getting
the better of Lazio’s
Marco Parolo