Claudio Ranieri is good at job interviews. He has plenty of experience at them, and, just as he does with his media interrogators, he can exude great charm and a sense of serious rigour at the same time. In his latest job interview he evidently looked perfect for the predicament in which Roma find themselves. Ranieri, in his charming way, later explained how he presented himself to Roma's board and president, Rosella Sensi, when he was approached, following the departure of Luciano Spalletti after the club's second defeat in as may matches of the Serie A season.
"As a Roman," he said, carefully reminding the city, and the fans of his roots, "I have been proud of the football Roma have played these past few seasons." As Claudio Ranieri, however, he would bring something else to the club: "A pragmatic approach." So the Tinkerman, as he was once known in English football for his fussy tactical changes and substitutions, is now the "fireman" for the Italian job market.
There are many Ranieris. At Chelsea, where he worked for nearly four years, he is remembered fondly now as the victim of a ruthless owner who sacked him, but also as the manager who messed up in a Champions League semi-final. At Valencia in Spain, where he had two spells, he is held in greater affection for the first than for the not-so-happy return. But he is respected there, as at Atletico Madrid, where he also took charge.
Yet the Italian version may be the truest reflection of the real Ranieri, one not mocked, as he was sometimes in England, for struggling with expressions in a foreign tongue, nor chided, as he was in Spain, for his perceived interventions in the transfer market. At Juventus, the club he left in April, transfers were not so much his domain, and the work he finished there was made up of 18 good months and then a few poorer ones, when he became, last spring, the coach who seemed to lose his grip on the team just as they entertained a faint hope of catching Inter Milan and making the title-race gripping.
Yet before that, Ranieri had been the redeemer of Juve, the coach who took them back into the Champions League a year after they were promoted from the second tier. It hardly needs repeating that no major European club had suffered as steep a fall as Juve, when Didier Deschamps and then Ranieri took them on: demoted to Serie B for the part played by their directors, led by Luciano Moggi, in the manipulation of referees in the period including their successive Italian titles of 2005 and 2006, and banned from Uefa tournaments for 24 months.
They needed to mount a quick comeback and a change of image. Thanks largely to Ranieri, they got both, as no longer the sinister Juve of "Lucky Luciano" but the one of "Plucky Claudio". He has now overseen several recoveries, including to his own reputation. Dismissed by Chelsea in 2004 to usher in Jose Mourinho, Ranieri returned to Valencia, where he had been popular in the late 1990s. It would be a short-lived and ill-fated reunion. So Ranieri took time out - and studied.
"The one thing you must never do in this job is think you know it all. The game is always moving on," he explained at the time. Then, in the spring of 2006, he was offered an apparently doomed vessel to rescue in the form of Parma, sinking towards the bottom of Serie A. With a remarkable turnaround, he saved them. With Roma, the fireman at least has 36 matches to scrape them off the floor. He will. Roma are too strong a squad to be fighting off talk of relegation for long, though the concern is if they begin this campaign as poorly as they did their last.
"We need an immediate turnaround," said Ranieri ahead of today's visit to Siena, "and I will have a different philosophy to my predecessor." That man, Spalletti, was widely liked for his perceived daring. Ranieri will play the straighter, wiser man, at least to start with. He has some credit in the bank, for being a former Roma footballer, and one whose image was doughty and crafty. "You know we Italians coaches admire players who know how to play tactically our way," Ranieri said.
"People say we're just about catenaccio and that's not true. But we do work hard on the defensive aspect and I want my teams, always, to be hard to beat." ihawkey@thenational.ae
