Protagonist where he first got to know Italian football. Tomorrow at Maradona Matteo Guendouzi he will return to where he made his official debut with the Biancoceleste shirt, a debut with a goal disallowed and three points that gave hope to a Lazio team that had started with zero points after the first two days. Lazio will arrive at tomorrow’s match with a different spirit, but certainly with a very different emergency in midfield. The Frenchman will once again be forced into overtime, it will be the fifteenth match as a starter out of 15 games in Serie A for Guendouzi, the only outfield player to have always started with Baroni in the league. The absences of Rovella and Vecino will weigh heavily and it will have to be the Frenchman who takes up the position, increasing his directorial duties by having Dele-Bashiru at his side.
Lazio, the extraordinary impact of Guendouzi
There has always been Matteo Guendouzi from that September 2023 to today, except for a couple of “singular” situations. The Frenchman did not play only three of the 50 matches he could have played in Serie Aone due to disqualification after the inexplicable red card received in the tragicomic Lazio-Milan last season. He missed the other two matches in mid-April last year, when after a heated confrontation in Formello with Tudor a problem with his left calf emerged which apparently forced him into the pits against Salernitana and Genoa. Baroni never gives up on it, even on Thursday he decided to use it in the final half hour to manage the double advantage. The only match missed this season was the one in Hamburg against Dynamo Kiev, the seasonal debut in Europe won easily 3-0 by the Biancocelesti. Tomorrow we will need the same Guendouzi seen at Maradona 15 months ago, capable of splitting the match in two and finding the goal. And maybe this time it won’t be an imaginative offside by Zaccagni, who never touched the ball in that action, that will cancel out his goal in Naples.