With just four points from seven games (four draws and three losses), Hellas Verona are yet to win in Serie A this season. But, despite scoring just two goals in seven league matches, there are, miraculously, still three teams with an inferior points tally as we approach Matchday 8. Richard Hough, author of Verona Campione, the Miracle of 1985, reflects on some equally calamitous starts over the years.
For the record, those two goals came from German midfielder and club captain Suat Serdar on 25 August against Udinese and 23-year-old Nigerian striker Gift Orban on 20 September against Juventus. Both games ended in draws.
By any definition, this is an appalling start to the season. But this is Verona, we’ve seen it all before.
In fact, despite the damming evidence to contrary, this is not even Verona’s worst start to a Serie A campaign. We don’t have to go back too far to find worse!
Starting badly in 2015
Despite the summer arrival of Giampaolo Pazzini from Milan on a five-year contract, the 2015/16 Serie A season got off to an even worse start for Hellas.
Luca Toni, the league’s capocannoniere the previous season, was sidelined through injury for much of the opening phase of the campaign. By the time the totemic striker returned, Hellas had plummeted to the foot of the table. By the mid-way point in the season, the team that had promised so much in the previous two campaigns had accumulated just eight points without a single single victory – a new record low for the club which found itself six points adrift at the bottom of the classifica.
Even in that ill-fated campaign, Hellas still managed to score six goals in the opening seven games. The defeats, however, came thick and fast, and long-standing coach Andrea Mandorlini was unceremoniously dismissed following a run of humiliating defeats against Bologna, Napoli and Frosinone. It was an ignominious end for the coach who had brought Hellas back from the brink of the footballing abyss, taking them from the foot of the Lega Pro to the top half of Serie A in just three years.
That bleak season inevitably ended in relegation, the trauma of which was eased by a rare victory against Juventus on the last game of the season, which coincided with an tear-jerking finale to the aforementioned Luca Toni’s long and illustrious playing career.
The yo-yo effect
The following season, Hellas bounced back, but the 2017/18 campaign in Serie A was, if anything, even more catastrophic than the previous. Under the unpopular leadership of Fabio Pecchia, the Hellas roster boasted some eye-catching offensive talent that included Moise Kean, Mattia Zaccagni and “the Korean Messi”, Lee Seung-woo.
Antonio Cassano even feigned an unlikely comeback, only to perform a characteristically petulant change of direction before a ball had even been kicked.
Ominously, Hellas lost the opening game of that season 3-1 at home to bitter southern rivals Napoli, followed a couple of weeks later by an uncharitable 5-0 spanking at the hands of our Tuscan twins, Fiorentina. Further heavy defeats against Roma and Lazio were followed in mid-October by the first victory of the season, a 1-0 win on Matchday 8 against minnows Benevento. The losses, however, continued to pile up, including a derby defeat the following weekend against Chievo.
Even that season, the worst in recent memory, Hellas somehow managed to score three goals in the opening seven fixtures, though two of them came on Matchday 7 itself against Torino (Kean and a last minute Pazzini penalty to equalise).
Juric brings stability
It was, inevitably, another season that ended in relegation, before the arrival of Ivan Juric in the summer of 2019 would eventually stabilise the club’s fortunes in the top tier (Hellas are now “enjoying” an unprecedented seventh successive season in Serie A, with notable 9th and 10th place finishes under Juric and Igor Tudor).
That all seems a long time ago now, and there’s no sugar coating the fact that with just two goals and four draws at this point in the season, Hellas are facing a significant challenge to their status in Serie A.
The only saving grace at the moment is that there are three clubs in the league in worse shape (Fiorentina, Genoa and Pisa), and that Verona are creating chances (15 shots against Pisa, 12 of them from inside the box, but just three on target). In fact, according to Fantamaster, Verona’s young and inexperienced strike force of Orban and Giovane have had 41 shots this season (21 and 20 respectively) – more than than other player in Serie A! Sooner or later those chances must be converted if Hellas are to dig themselves out of their current predicament.
The next opportunity to do so comes on Sunday afternoon as the Bentegodi hosts Cagliari, four points and four places above Hellas in the league table.
Sunday afternoon games are a rare treat in modern football, with kick-off times now dispersed seemingly at random across the entire weekend to accommodate the insidious demands of TV scheduling. The convenient kick-off time will ensure that the legacy fans will be out in full force, and a few will even take the overnight ferry from Sardinia to follow their team. For the locals, the famed Sunday lunchtime favourite, Bollito con Pearà, will be feverishly devoured with family, before they hop on their scooters to the stadium for a beer with the butei under the looming shadow of the Curva Sud.
With the Catholic feast day of Tutti i Santi (All Saints’ Day) rapidly approaching, anything but three-points on Sunday could see Hellas coach Paolo Zanetti summarily defrocked. A victory, on the other hand, may not exactly put him on the path to sainthood, but will at least guarantee him the blessing of the Verona faithful for another week.
Richard Hough is the author of Verona Campione, the Miracle of 1985.