Gennaro Gattuso almost did not take another job on the bench. The Lazio head coach said after his side’s win at the Allianz Stadium that the attitudes he had been seeing in dressing rooms were pushing him away from the dugout, and that the way back was to lean on the player he used to be.
“I said that I didn’t want to be a coach anymore because I’ve been a player, so every time I saw certain attitudes, I’d go home with a bellyache,” he said at the post-match press conference carried by Football Italia.
Lazio ran out comfortable winners in Turin on Saturday, 18 October. Oliver Provstgaard headed in just after the half-hour, Gustav Isaksen doubled the lead on 66 minutes and Fisayo Dele-Bashiru added a third late on, delivering the club’s first league win at Juventus since October 2017.
‘A real family unit here’
What changed, in Gattuso’s telling, was how he set the rules of the room.
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“The things I stick to, they need to follow and that’s it.”
“We push hard in training, but we’ve created a real family unit here.”
He was keen to hand the result back to the squad.
“My staff and I propose ideas, but it’s the lads who put it into practice, so they deserve the credit,” he told reporters.
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From the Italy exit to joint top of Serie A
Gattuso took over at Lazio in late June, replacing Maurizio Sarri. He arrived with his coaching reputation freshly dented, having stepped down as Italy manager in April after a play-off defeat to Bosnia and Herzegovina confirmed a third straight failure to reach a World Cup.
The win lifted Lazio level with Inter at the top of Serie A on 19 points, and it is Gattuso’s team that has made the historic start: six wins and a draw from the opening seven matches, the best seven-game run in Lazio’s history.
He is not getting carried away.
“We mustn’t look at the table right now,” he said. “If we take it one game at a time, we can surprise people.”
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