After two interesting evening training sessions for Luciano Spalletti’s AS Roma at Harvard’s Ohiri Field, Tuesday evening’s session had some reoccurring exercises from Monday and work on set pieces.
One development worth mentioning however for AS Roma supporters, all four players who competed at the Euros, Daniele De Rossi, Alessandro Florenzi, Stephen El Shaarawy and Radja Nainggolan, participated in the full training session with the main group. It was the first time they had done so in the evening session since arriving in Boston. The previous two nights they all dropped out early and did some running off on one side of the field.
The session began similar to the previous evening, with some juggling and no formal warm-up, before going into a 12v12 exercise. The pace of this exercise was not done at full intensity, same as Monday evening, so this may have been serving the purposes of a warm-up, albeit a more intricate one! At least some of the players did also walk from the hotel to the training ground, a distance of just over half a mile.
The 12v12 exercise once again involved two teams, with an extra center forward each as the twelfth player, playing combination passes simultaneously up opposite sides of the field. The field was again split vertically down the middle with cones and the ball and players involved had to stay on the same side of the field the play started on. Area was the width of the field and the goals were at the tops of the penalty areas.
Once again, they utilized several different combination patterns, like on Monday, but the two constants were the ball from the keeper was always to the holding mid and the winger always wound up checking into the half space from a wide position. One twist on Tuesday from Monday was the center mid moving into the fullback space and that served as the trigger for the fullback to push up the touchline and eventually put the ball into the center forward from a wide position. The crosses to the center forward were once again mostly played into feet and kept on the ground, high crosses were rare whether it was meant for Edin Dzeko or Totti.
This covered the first thirty minutes of the session. The next thirty minutes involved the two teams splitting up. One group worked on attacking right sided corners, while the other worked on attacking set pieces from about 30-35 yards out. After fifteen minutes, the groups switched.
For the attacking set pieces exercise, four plastic men held the offside line at the top of the penalty area. Two attackers would stand offside and four would run into the penalty area off the free kick delivery. The two offsides players would check back, one coming all the way out by himself about 7-8 yards past the wall and the other checked his run when he met the onrushing players and crashed back into the penalty area with them.
The corner kick group worked only on the right side with a couple variants of attack. One was a short corner routine and the other was predicated on a player coming out of the six yard box towards the corner to take a ball into feet and then laying it off to the corner kick taker to put the ball in. Only thing of interest here was Totti got frustrated with his balls into the six yard box. He seemingly, again language barrier makes this difficult to asses, initially didn’t like the return ball he was getting to set him up and then was just frustrated as his service was a bit off.
The two groups then came back together and finished with a 11v11 half field game and the extra goalkeepers did some work catching crosses in the opposite goal. The session ended around 7:00pm as a group of VIPs was brought down to the field to meet the players.
Today instead of training, AS Roma arranged two friendlies against local sides with half the squad slated to play in each. The morning match was against a FC Bolts team from the Premier Development League, the fourth division of US soccer, which Roma ran out 5-1 winners.
Spalletti was quoted before the trip expressing some disappointment over only having one field with which to train. He said sometimes it was necessary to train different “departments” on separate pitches but that they would adapt and tighten the spaces for training. That raises the question of how Spalletti may have done some of the team’s work differently if he had two full fields instead of one. The goalkeepers did on one night jump over to an adjoining unlined field to work on punts and goalkicks, however.
Anyway, whether all the methods used were a matter of preference or necessity by Spalletti this week, it has been a delight to take in the training of such a high profile Club as AS Roma.
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