GIALLOROSSI YORKSHIRE BLOG
It's April 2016. Roma are losing 2-1 at home to Torino, with minutes remaining. A slip up now could be costly in the race for Champions League qualification, with Inter only four points behind with five games left. Enter Francesco Totti.
Totti had been used sparingly by Luciano Spalletti after the Italian coach returned to the club that January, often making brief appearances from the bench. But now, Spalletti was out of ideas. He turned to Roma's captain, bringing off defensive midfielder Seydou Keita. It was now or never. Straight away, Miralem Pjanic crossed the ball from a free kick. Kostas Manolas headed it on and Totti followed the flight of the ball at the back post. The veteran dived forward, sticking his right boot out to fire the ball past Daniele Padelli. 2-2. Three minutes later, Roma won a penalty, as Diego Perotti's cross was handled in the box. Perotti himself was known as a proven penalty taker, but there was only going to be one player taking this. Totti took a deep breath, before shooting to Padelli's right-hand side. Time stood still for a moment... then the ball crossed the line. This was the stuff of legend. Totti had created magic to turn the game on its head. Fans in the stadium were reduced to tears as their hero pulled them back from the brink yet again. Roma would win the game, and secure 3rd place by the end of the season. Totti was certainly no stranger to inspiring comebacks. His influence in turning a loss into a win against Torino was not an isolated event. Throughout his career, Totti made a habit of changing the outcome of a game on his own. Just over a year earlier, he had scored two second half goals to bring Roma from 2-0 down to snatch a 2-2 draw against rivals Lazio, writing his name into Derby Della Capitale folklore by becoming the rivalry's all-time leading scorer. This was a man who never knew when to give up, who was hungry to win no matter the circumstances. It happened all throughout his career. Rewind to his very first goal for Roma, in a Serie A match with Foggia, and the result would have been different without his input. Roma drew 1-1 that day, and would have lost without Totti's goal. Even as a teenager, he was changing games - a habit that he wouldn't grow out of right up until his retirement. Over the course of his career, Totti's goals contributed to a mammoth 170 points for Roma. That's the extreme level of his impact on the club. After his goal earned a point against Foggia that September day in 1994, not a season went by in which at least one of Totti's goals changed the outcome of a match. For those wondering where Roma would have been without Totti, a fact like this puts things into perspective. He was turning cup ties on their heads right from the beginning, too. In October 1994, Roma were trailing Genoa 2-0 after the first leg of their Coppa Italia Round of 16 clash. It was none other than Totti who scored the opener in the second leg, only a month after officially becoming an adult, setting Roma on their way to a 3-2 win and a change of fortunes in the tie. The young Totti was showing he could have an influence on games even in the early days of his career. A few years later, under Zeman in the 1997-98 season, Totti's goals meant Roma finished four points better off. Consequently, they finished 4th, in the UEFA Cup places. Had Totti not been involved, Roma would have finished down in 7th, missing out on qualification for the competition. Over time, his contributions grew and grew. The following season was his first as captain, and the armband wasn't a burden for him, as his goals accounted for eight points. For the second consecutive year, Roma achieved a European qualification which they wouldn't have done without their talisman, and fate repeated itself for a third successive season when Totti helped Roma to a 6th-place finish in the 1999-2000 Serie A. The next year would be a sweet one for everyone at Roma. For only the third time in their history, the Giallorossi won the Scudetto, in a title race that went down to the wire. Totti scored on the final day, a decisive 3-1 win over Parma, with his 13th goal of the league season. In the club's most crucial times, he stepped up to the plate and delivered. Without his strikes that season, Roma wouldn't even have finished in the top two. Having won the Serie A title, Roma achieved Champions League qualification for the first time in Totti's career. Fabio Capello's side were drawn in a group with Real Madrid, Lokomotiv Moscow and Anderlecht. They finished 2nd in the group, qualifying for the second group stage. Along the way, Totti scored a late winner against Lokomotiv to ensure the Giallorossi finished above their Russian counterparts. The world was watching, and Totti was delivering. There were low points in Totti's remarkable journey, though. The 2004-05 season, in which Roma went through four managers, was a particular struggle. Roma were three points away from being relegated after only winning one of their last 13 games. Totti's 12 league goals that year were worth five points to the team. Without him, it would have been Serie B for only the second time in the club's history - a harrowing thought of what a world without Totti might have been like for Roma. On the bright side that year, Roma reached the Coppa Italia final, and it was Totti's winner against Udinese in the Last Four that put them there in the first place. Sadly, neither Totti nor any of his teammates could score in the two-legged final, as Inter won 3-0 on aggregate. Better things would return, and in 2006-07, Totti had his best goalscoring season ever. He netted 32 times in all competitions to clinch the European Golden Shoe. It was his most effective season for Roma, as he won the side 21 points with his goals, a performance that meant Roma finished five places better off, in second. As Totti entered the final 10 years of his career, he continued to inspire comebacks. One notable example was in the penultimate game of the 2009-10 season, when Roma were losing 1-0 to Cagliari with just 15 minutes left. Totti managed to equalise in the 79th minute, before finding the winner from the penalty spot just four minutes later in a dramatic turnaround. Totti always kept his composure late on. Against Udinese in April 2011, Totti had put Roma 1-0 up before Antonio Di Natale equalised late on. Never settling for a draw, Totti found the back of the net with the outside of his boot in the fourth minute of stoppage time, restoring Roma's lead with a piece of pure striking instinct. As he approached 40 years of age, and coaches became more reluctant to use him, Totti continued to defy the odds and lead Roma to unlikely comebacks. In April 2016, he came on as a late substitute against Atalanta and scored an equaliser in a 3-3 draw just seven minutes after entering the action. Totti struck the ball low and hard into the corner to rescue a point for Roma. Three days later, he would inspire the miraculous comeback against Torino; this was the perfect precursor to that infamous day. Totti only scored three goals in his final season, but two of them were game-changers. Against Sampdoria, he showed nerves of steel to score a 93rd-minute winner from the penalty spot in a game that had been delayed for over an hour due to rain. His last ever goal for Roma came in February 2017, against Cesena in the Coppa Italia quarter-final. It was another late penalty, as he fired Roma into the next round in the 97th minute. The old legs still had it. Many successful footballers possess great levels of skill and technique. But it takes someone special to impose themselves on a game in the way Francesco Totti did. Few players can win a game single-handed, performing when the rest of their teammates are not, but Totti was one of those players. As such, he earned dozens of important results for Roma, part of the process that made him so dear to the fanbase. It really is frightening to imagine where Roma might have been if he hadn't stayed with the club for his whole career.
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samuel bannister
Founder and editor of Giallorossi Yorkshire, who is also a columnist for Roma's official website about the women's team. Categories
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