As managerial appointments go it was far from being the most prestigious, yet it made headlines nonetheless, mainly down to the reputation of the man involved rather than the club he had chosen to begin his journey.
On June 30th just gone Hernan Crespo, one of the best strikers of his generation, was appointed manager of Serie B club Modena. It is Crespo’s first step into first team management, after being in charge of Parma’s Primavera side last season, and a perfect one at that. The Argentinian goal machine has signed a one year deal with the Emilian club with the option for two more.
While from Crespo’s point of view it is the perfect starting point, for Modena however it is the ultimate gamble, appointing a manager with no experience at this level. However it is a gamble that the Gialloblu had to make.
The morale at the club has been hit hard in recent years, due to the promotions of both Sassuolo and Carpi to Serie A. Modena have always been seen as the traditional powerhouse of their province and now not only are they not the best they’ve even slipped to third an unthinkable situation for this historic club.
If all that wasn’t bad enough Modena have been pretty awful on the pitch as well, only just retaining there Serie B status for this season thanks to a relegation play-off win over Virtus Entella. The hope is that Crespo will be able to turn around the club’s fortunes and while the world of football will not pay much attention to his exploits two Serie A clubs in particular should keep one eye trained in closely on events in Emilia-Romagna.
Those two clubs are Inter and Ac Milan and the answer to why they should watch Crespo’s journey unfold lies right at the feet of a certain Antonio Conte. Over the last number of seasons the two Milanese clubs in a desperate attempt to keep pace with the Conte built Juve juggernaut, have tried to mirror the clubs approach by appointing young inexperienced in house managers in the hope that it will give the clubs the bounce that the Bianconeri got on Conte’s appointment.
Not surprisingly each of these young managers have crashed and burned, Andrea Stramaccioni (Inter) Clarence Seedorf and Pippo Inzaghi (Milan). As it turned out being a club legend or part of the fabric of the club in Stramaccioni’s case, was not enough to make up for a complete lack of experience.
Maybe Conte was just a freak of nature a manager able to come from nowhere and rebuild the club where he had made his name. Yet what many people forget about Conte is that he was by no means a novice when he was handed the Juve job. In fact the Vecchia Signoria were his fifth job in management having already taken charge of Arezzo, Bari, Atalanta and Siena.
While his spells at Arezzo and Atalanta would end sourly, he tasted success in his other two posts guiding Bari and Siena to promotion from Serie B. It was this hard graft at the lower levels that those in charge of Inter and Milan missed, they just thought that a great player from Juve’s past, who knew the club inside and out had stepped in to lead the club forward and if they simple copied that method the same would happen for them. Not so as it so evidently turned out.
This is where Crespo makes his appearance. At the start of last season Crespo was given his first managerial position in charge of the Parma Primavera side. Everyone knows the fate that befell the Crociati, but what few people know is that while the club was going to rack and ruin around him the Argentine guided his young charges to sixth in the table.
It was truly a commendable job by Crespo especially when come the end of the Parma debacle, stories emerged that his young players had to have cold showers after matches because there was no warm water and were getting sick as a result. This along with the fact that other clubs paid the bus fare to get the Parma team to matches only enhances the job he did.
If Parma didn’t go bankrupt this post season there is a strong possibility that Crespo could have been staring into his first job in Serie A. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Crespo was being groomed by the club to eventually take over from Roberto Donadoni only for future events to put pay to that.
This has been very much to Modena’s favour as they have now snapped up a talented young manager. As for the Milan clubs it gives them the perfect chance to watch Crespo from afar and study his potential to succeed at the top one day.
Also let’s not forget that Crespo played for both Milan clubs with some distinction (116 games with Inter 45 goals and 40 games with Milan 17 goals) and still has plenty of goodwill with both sides of the San Siro divide.
So while Inter and Milan have one eye on returning to the Champions League, if they really want a young talented club legend as there manager in the future a la in the Antonio Conte mould they can do worse things than to keep their other eye on events unfolding in one corner of Serie B.
The post Crespo and Modena: Why the Milan clubs should pay attention appeared first on Italian Football Daily.
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