When a coach is on top of his game, he sometimes can seem clairvoyant.
Beginning his and Barcelona's defence of the Uefa Champions League on Wednesday night in Rome, Luis Enrique might have foreseen this fixture when, just after winning the European Cup final in May over Juventus, he make a remark guaranteed to go down well in the crimson half of Italy's capital.
“This victory,” he said of Barcelona’s 2-1 win in Berlin, “is also for the supporters of Roma.”
Any club, with the possible exception of rivals Lazio, who deny Juventus a moment of glory automatically gain the approval of Roma fans. When a Juve setback comes with a special dedication to them, all the better.
Luis Enrique knows Roma’s passions, their followers’ loyalties and their fierce enmities and tempers. He spent a season in the Roma dugout, a formative episode in his career as a coach.
It was one with enough freshly remembered souvenirs that the welcome given to him at the Stadio Olimpico would not be indifferent even if he had not given Romans a little wink with his comment after the beating of Juventus.
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What he did not know then was that his next European fixture would be Wednesday at the grounds of his former employer.
It was a risky appointment when he joined Roma in the summer of 2011. He spoke little Italian and was accompanied to news conferences by his interpreter, who soon noted how diligent the 41-year-old Spaniard was in tackling his tasks.
Luis Enrique also read the local press and watched television, not because he was overly concerned about opinions of him but to increase his football vocabulary in the language of his new place of work.
He was a hunch choice by Roma, who that spring had come under the ownership of US-based investors. At that stage in his managerial career, he had one entry on his CV: he had been a successful coach of Barcelona’s B team.
He had no senior, hands-on experience, as a coach, just good references from those who had worked with him, the pedigree of having been a Barcelona captain as a player and a commitment, as he said at his interview, to attacking football.
The first months would be tough. Roma were eliminated from the Europa League, before the group phase, by Slovan Bratislava. It would be five competitive matches into the season before a team displaying symptoms of defensive naivete recorded a first win. He made some unpopular choices, too, such as substituting captain and resident hero Francesco Totti.
That caused problems with supporters when it coincided with a bad result. Luis Enrique will still recall the angry response of Roma fans when the team returned to the capital from Tuscany after a 3-0 defeat against Fiorentina, when his starting XI had excluded Totti.
He might have thought of that low point when, last January, six months into his stint as Barcelona coach, he left Lionel Messi on the bench away at Real Socieded. Barca lost. Cue howls from fans and local media in Catalonia just as shrill as anything he knew in Rome.
The aftermath of that is well-known: a soaring affirmation during the next five months of the skills as a manager that Roma, perhaps too early, thought they had spotted in 2011. Barca went on from the dip at Real Sociedad to claim the Primera Liga, Copa del Rey and Champions League.
Roma, in turn, moved on from their Luis Enrique season to grow into the second-best team in Italy. They have finished runners-up to Juventus the past two seasons, an uplift from the seventh place they registered in his one season as a Serie A coach.
But they did not immediately rise after his spell there, and from the perspective of four years later, his reign in Rome looks neither so brilliant nor really so bad.
Even Totti has archived his clashes with the former Spain international. “Luis Enrique was always straight with me, and a coach with great ability,” the Roma captain said recently.
On Wednesday night, less than two weeks before his 39th birthday, Totti would expect to start on the bench against Barca.
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