Chris Smalling
The former Manchester United defender is loving his new life in Rome
Christmas this year was very different for Roma defender Chris Smalling. Rather than return to the frost and fog of Manchester, the Englishman and his family, together with friends, spent a glorious sunblest festive break in his new home on the ancient Via Appia in Rome.
And it would be a mistake to imagine the 30-year-old as some sort of Napoleon, languishing in exile on St Helena, wondering why he no longer plays for either England or Manchester United.
When United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer told him in August that he would no longer be an automatic first-choice selection, Smalling knew what he wanted to do. Solskjaer told him that there would be plenty of football for him, but that meant “maybe half the games”, says Smalling.
So when a £3million loan offer came in from Roma he jumped at it. One morning he was in Manchester talking it through with Solskjaer, the next day he was in Italy talking to Roma’s Portuguese coach Paulo Fonseca. It was all done and dusted in 48 hours.
“It was a little bit daunting at first,” recalls Smalling. “For someone who had lived all his life in England it was quite a big change in a matter of days.
“But it was an experience that I was looking forward to, and when the opportunity came, and my family was up for it, then I didn’t want to have regrets about not taking it.
“At this point it has gone better than I could ever have imagined.”
Smalling was rated Roma’s best player by sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport in January’s 1-1 derby draw with Lazio, although he feels that “nine times out of 10, Roma should have won that game”.
That was by no means the first time the critics had rated him Roma’s top performer. For much of this season he has looked poised, assured and totally authoritative, winning a lot of approval.
Of course, there is nothing Italians appreciate more than a good defender and of his initial impressions of Serie A he says: “I find it very competitive. When you watch it from England and you see Juventus winning every year it doesn’t seem that way, but when you come here you find that it is very competitive.
“Even the smaller teams are not easy to break down, there are no easy games.”
Smalling, Romelu Lukaku and Christian Eriksen are the most recent high-profile recruits to a league which landed one of the biggest stars of all last season in Cristiano Ronaldo. He might be 35 now, but the Portuguese was pretty unstoppable as he helped Juve to a 2-1 win against Smalling and his team-mates at the Olimpico just before Christmas. At one point Ronaldo prompted a gasp of enthusiastic approval from fans when he gave Smalling the slip. Generously, even the defender himself was impressed, explaining: “Ronaldo goes quiet for three or four games and everyone is saying he is past it – and then he goes and scores eight goals in six games.
“He is someone who is special. He could rest on his laurels, given what he has already achieved, but he still has that drive. That is what makes him so great.”
Smalling has clearly adapted comfortably to Italy, yet not all British exports have settled so well. Back in 1961, Jimmy Greaves scored nine goals in his first 12 league games for Milan but was back in England by Christmas. Then there was Ian Rush, whose form never reached Liverpool levels during his one and only season with an admittedly poor Juventus.
To be fair, others such as Irishman Liam Brady, also in the 1980s, did much better when it came to integration. Key to settling in is to learn Italian and Smalling has already set out on that road, revealing: “Here at the club you could almost get by without Italian because a lot of the staff speak English, but I wanted to be able to communicate and make that effort.
“It would be nice, come the end of the season, to have picked up a language.”
In the beginning, most of his communication with coach Fonseca was in English, which the Portuguese speaks well. However, as time has gone by, he finds team talks and training sessions in Italian cause no problems since he has long since picked up key words such as “left, right,
press, (man on)” and so on.
Smalling believes it is no cliche to suggest that Italian football is more tactically organised, with even lower-table sides building their whole game on defensive solidity. He says that he has worked more on tactics at Roma than with any previous club.
Respected figures such as Fabio Capello and Arrigo Sacchi regularly point out that Italian teams can be in difficulty in the Champions League because Serie A football is not played at the same intense rhythm as, in particular, the Premier League, but Smalling says: “I don’t know about that. At times, Italian teams are very street wise about how to take the steam out of a game if you are leading, whereas in England we’re more gung-ho.”
If there has been a dark cloud on Smalling’s Italian horizon it has clearly come through his experience of racism or, at the very best, racist misunderstanding. That happened in December when Rome sports daily Corriere dello Sport published a preview of the next day’s Internazionale v Roma clash under the headline “Black Friday”, complete with full-page pictures of both Smalling and his former United team-mate Lukaku, who is now with Inter. Even though Corriere dello Sport editor Ivan Zazzaroni immediately claimed that the paper’s intention had been to celebrate the “magnificent wealth of diversity” in football, that front page prompted a well-documented international row, with many in Italy and elsewhere accusing Corriere dello Sport of clumsy insensitivity. Remember, this season had already seen ugly racist incidents at games involving Lukaku and Brescia’s Mario Balotelli to name but two.
For many Italians “Black Friday” is just a marketing slogan for a weekend when the IT multi-nationals hope to sell a lot of smartphones and laptops. So did Smalling feel that the Black Friday front page had been a case more of ignorance and insensitivity rather than racial hatred? After all, someone – perhaps innocently – had decided to preview the game by focusing on two of the main protagonists, two men with much in common: they are former team-mates, had both done spectacularly well in their first six months in Serie A and, of course, both are black.
“I was obviously aware of this because such a big thing was made of it – and rightly so," says Smalling. “I was more disappointed, and yes, a bit offended, but it is the sort of thing you see and you think to yourself, why?
“Surely, things like that should not be printed in mainstream national publications.”
On the subject of the Three Monkeys in an anti-racism campaign for Serie A two weeks later – something that to many seemed blatantly offensive – Smalling could only conclude this is, above all, an educational problem, arguing: “I couldn’t quite believe that, when I saw it first. I thought it wasn’t for real, given the storm that had already happened to then go and do that.
“It is a real disappointment, but I think that a lot of it is down to a lack of education. I would like to think that is the main driver behind anyone who intentionally does things like this.”
Education is not a word used casually by Smalling. After all, he is a rare beast in the firmament of top-level professional footballers in that he has three A Levels: in Business Studies, Economics and Maths respectively. His mother, who brought him and his brother up as a single mum following the death of her husband when Chris was just five, focused much of that upbringing on school, ensuring that both her boys studied all the way through to A levels.
The result was that when Chris, already an England schoolboy international, went for trials with Fulham and Middlesbrough at the age of 18, he had been accepted by two universities.
Unlike many of his contemporaries he went into his trials in a very relaxed frame of mind, recalling: “Very few people are going to get a contract at 18 but the fact that I had my A Levels and university already in the bag meant
that going to these trials was just a bit of a bonus. For me, university was Plan A, football was Plan B.”
And Plan B, via Fulham and then Manchester United, worked out very nicely. So where does Plan C take him?
Right now, he makes no secret of the fact he wants to stay with Roma and says: “The manager here is very ambitious. Obviously getting back into the Champions League is one of the things he wants to do and if we could win the Europa League along the way, that would be fantastic too.”
What might also be fantastic would be for him to reclaim a place in the England team. He has not played international football since June 2017 but could his current good form earn a recall? Has he heard from England manager Gareth Southgate recently and does he still hope for a call-up to the Euro 2020 squad?
Smalling admits: “No, I haven’t spoken to him but I know he has watched some of my recent
games and, of course, I would love a call-up for Euro 2020 ”
Whatever the immediate future holds for him, there is much more to be said about Chris Smalling. He is not only an excellent footballer but also a modern one, open to new ideas such as the vegan diet which, thanks to wife Sam, he has now followed for three years. He claims that the diet – no meat, fish, milk or eggs – has helped cure his knee tendonitis while also speeding up his recovery after games.
And as someone who grew up in a household where money was tight, it is no surprise he keeps an eye out for the disadvantaged via Football Beyond Borders, a British social charity, which helps disadvantaged kids who might be passionate about football but who fall a bit by the wayside at school.
Interview by Paddy Agnew