The Stadio Olimpico was not a happy place just after 3pm on Saturday afternoon. Lazio were losing at home to Torino, who had been outscored by their previous five league opponents by a combined 10 goals to two. Ultras from the Curva Nord were wrapping up the latest protest in their never-ending feud with the club’s owner, Claudio Lotito.
Was Lazio’s season coming unstitched, or had there never been a thread holding it together in the first place? They reappointed Maurizio Sarri as manager this summer, only for him to later acknowledge that the club had not mentioned the transfer ban they were about to receive for financial irregularities. Rumours that he might quit were unfounded, but he did say Lotito had “swindled” him.
The Biancocelesti became as messy on the pitch as they were off it, beating Verona 4-0 and Genoa 3-0 but losing the rest of their first five games, including the Rome derby. At any given moment, it has been hard to tell if they are improving or imploding.
At least one man kept smiling through it. Matteo Cancellieri was not even supposed to be at Lazio this season. He spent the last one on loan at Parma and, early this summer, his parent club were pushing for him to stay there a while longer. The transfer ban forced a rethink. Lazio could not afford to thin their squad without replacements.
He joined in the first place during Sarri’s previous tenure, then a 20-year-old graduate of Verona’s academy. He made 20 league appearances for Lazio in 2022-23, all but one of those as a substitute. The club’s longtime sporting director, Igli Tare, who left at the end of that season, would later accuse Sarri of “telling everyone Cancellieri would be a star then never playing him”.
Perhaps the manager was still trying to work out the nature of the player’s talent. Billed as a wide forward on arrival, Cancellieri nevertheless spent much of that season as an ineffective backup to Ciro Immobile at No 9. In 63 appearances on loan at Empoli and Parma over the last two seasons, he scored seven times. Shoehorning him into a poacher’s role was always going to be a poor fit.
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Verona 0-1 Sassuolo, Atalanta 1-1 Como, Inter 4-1 Cremonese, Lazio 3-3 Torino, Parma 0-1 Lecce, Juventus 0-0 Milan, Napoli 2-1 Genoa, Bologna 4-0 Pisa, Fiorentina 1-2 Roma, Udinese 1-1 Cagliari
Or maybe it was just a question of timing. If the transfer ban ensured Cancellieri’s place in Lazio’s squad, then it was a lengthy layoff for the Denmark international Gustav Isaksen, who contracted glandular fever during the summer, that gave the Italian a chance to claim a spot in the starting XI during pre-season.
He did exactly that, delivering a string of impressive friendly performances. Left-footed and playing as an inverted winger on the right of a 4-3-3, his manner of cutting in from the flank to shoot had commentators remembering why he was billed by more optimistic observers as a “next Arjen Robben” when he joined the club in 2022.
To call that a premature comparison would be to pretend there is a comparison at all. We don’t know yet if Cancellieri is an unpolished diamond or simply having a purple patch, but he has carried that pre-season form into the start of this campaign. He was a lone bright light for Lazio in their opening defeat by Como and did well again in the thrashing of Verona.
Left out of the derby defeat, Cancellieri marked his return with a fourth-minute goal and a man-of-the-match performance in the win over Genoa. And then came this weekend against Torino. The saying goes that a person who smiles in a crisis is the one who worked out who to blame, but sometimes the secret is simpler. A ball, a pitch, an opponent to run at. Cancellieri is just delighted to be back in Rome, the city of his birth, and starting regularly.
Lazio looked ripe to fall apart on Saturday, not just because they fell behind early but because they were outplayed during the opening exchanges by a Torino side coached by their former manager, Marco Baroni. Then Valentín Castellanos released Cancellieri with an angled ball to dissect Torino’s centre-backs from inside his own half. Realising he didn’t have the legs to get away from them, Cancellieri instead gave people cause to think once again of a certain Dutchman, wrongfooting his pursuers with a touch to the left before smashing his shot into the top corner.
He wasn’t the only one grinning now as he jogged back to halfway, stopping to give a little butt-wiggle. What to do for an encore? Perhaps the same thing? The ball forward this time came from Toma Basic and Cancellieri received it running into the corner of the penalty box, much closer to the goal. But the meat was the same: drive the defender off-balance, cut back inside and stick the ball into the (this time bottom) corner.
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From 1-0 down to 2-1 up. A better team might have capitalised on their momentum against fragile Torino. But Lazio are not that team. The game stabilised until Ché Adams popped up with a 73rd-minute equaliser. Lazio’s defenders lost track of him completely as he attacked Niels Nkounkou’s cross.
Torino thought they had claimed a precious win when Saúl Coco headed in from a corner at the start of injury time. But the same player would subsequently give away a penalty at the other end with a hip check on Tijjani Noslin. The Dutch forward was initially judged to have dived, but that decision was reversed after a lengthy VAR review and a scuffle between the two teams. Danilo Cataldi smashed home his penalty in the 103rd minute.
By the end it was hard to know what conclusions to draw beyond the fact that these two flawed teams had served up an entertaining spectacle, and that Cancellieri is one of the players to keep an eye on in Serie A at the moment. Perhaps this is a flash in the pan, or maybe something more.
A nation that has spent so many years lamenting its shortage of high-quality forwards is itching to see one of the current flock of prospects flourish into a genuine star, from Pio Esposito at Inter to Francesco Camarda at Lecce. Cancellieri is a few years ahead of those two, but a breakthrough season at 23 would hardly make him a late bloomer.
A dig into his underlying numbers gives more reasons for hope. Besides now being Lazio’s top scorer this season, Cancellieri has also won more tackles than any teammate, is joint-first in passes intercepted and second for headers. He certainly puts himself about, in other words. Sarri has hailed him for returning from his loans “more mature” than when they last worked together.
“Going away on loan did me good,” agreed Cancellieri. “I’ve grown up, in lots of ways.”
