Has Sarri stumbled upon perfect role for magic Mertens?
It had still yet to sink in when Dries Mertens appeared in front of the cameras early on Sunday evening. “In order to get my head around it, I’m going to have to go home, be by myself for a bit and have a think,” he said. Like Tom Hanks in Castaway, Mertens’ only company, as he sits contemplatively in his Posillipo villa, will be a ball with a much less catchy name than Wilson. It’ll just be him and a Nike Ordem IV. A week ago, Mertens had asked Napoli’s club secretary to book another seat next to him on the flight back from Sardinia. The Belgian folletto - small and spritely - was bringing the match-ball back home with him after scoring a hat-trick in a 5-0 win away to Cagliari.
On Sunday night, Mertens brought a friend back for the Nike Ordem IV. Heading home from Napoli's Christmas party, his wife Kat didn't disapprove of him walking in the front door with his arm around a special someone. It was another match ball. Earlier in the day Mertens had become the first player to score hat-tricks in back-to-back league games since Pietro Anastasi in 1974. Completed in only nine minutes, it was the fastest since Andriy Shevchenko’s against Perugia at the turn of the century.
Dries Lightning didn’t stop there either as just when fans were congratulating each other with pats on the back for wittily renaming him Tries Mertens, he scored again. Dribbling away from goal, Mertens lobbed Joe Hart on the turn from an acute angle, improbably getting the ball up and down to beat the upstanding 6’ 4” Torino goalkeeper at a distance of little more than 12 yards. Not since Beppe Savoldi, who was famously the subject of a world record breaking transfer in 1975, has a Napoli player produced a poker.
It was a gol alla Maradona, a player Mertens perhaps shares a little more than just his initials with. As the 'Tries' headlines were tossed in the bin, the papers all ran like mad with this instead and one can easily imagine Series Two of the Young Pope featuring Voiello, the Napoli-obsessed Cardinal Secretary of State, reading a copy of Monday’s Il Corriere dello Sport in the Vatican Gardens. The front-page suggested Mertens’ had been touched by the Hand of God, as if he were Adam in Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “Diego Armando Mertens,” was the Rome paper's benediction. Humbled by the comparison, Mertens smiled: “I'm proud but I’ve still got a lot of hard work to do” to live up to the player in whose honour Napoli retired the No.10 shirt.
For one day, though, it didn’t feel like blasphemy to mention the two in the same sentence and there was a wonderful timing to Mertens’ performance, coming as it did swiftly on the heels of Real Madrid’s win in the Club World Cup against Kashima Antlers. Drawn together in the Round of 16 of the Champions League, Real reminded Napoli of the scale of the task awaiting them in February as Cristiano Ronaldo scored a hat-trick. Mertens’ poker was treated as the perfect response to the newly crowned world champions and this year's Ballon d’Or winner. It was a tongue-in-cheek ‘whatever you can do, Cristiano, I can do better’.
On this theme, Monday’s Gazzetta dello Sport dedicated their opening pages to the “due fenomeni on a collision course.” As with Maradona, they are not saying Mertens is as good as Ronaldo but it hasn't gone unnoticed that one has followed a similar career path to the other at least in going from being a winger to a striker and metamorphosing all of a sudden into a prolific goalscorer. Mertens has struck seven times in the last seven days in Serie A. The last player to do that in Italy, rather poignantly, was the great Gunnar Nordahl in 1955. Gonzalo Higuain broke the Swede's remarkable single-season scoring record last season and although his goal was the difference when he faced his former club in October, just as it was in Saturday night’s top of the table clash between Juventus and Roma, it’d be wrong to say Napoli miss him.
Napoli have scored five in back-to-back games and just so happen to be five goals better off than they were at this stage last year. They are the league’s top scorers and haven’t scored 37 goals in their opening 17 games of the season in close to half a century. The principal difference with last year - Napoli are a point worse off - is in the defending. Silly mistakes, the six-week absence of Raul Albiol and a tendency to take some games for granted like they did on Sunday when Torino scored three in defeat, leaving Sarri apoplectic - "I haven't gone back to the dressing room that pissed off in a long time" - have, on occasion, cost Napoli points. Other than that, it has been the same old Napoli: beautiful to watch and close to irresistible going forward. Napoli’s style has always been the star. It elevated Higuain to have the best season of his career last term just as it is elevating Mertens to hit new heights now.
Sarri deserves an awful lot of credit for it. In the summer he lost his 36-goal striker to his biggest rival. Then just as Higuain's replacement Arkadiusz Milik was beginning to show everyone that there is life at Napoli after El Pipita, scoring seven goals in nine games, the Poland international tore his ACL. To make matters worse Sarri effectively lost Manolo Gabbiadini whose confidence in the club and himself was shattered into a thousand tiny pieces by Napoli's pursuit not only of Milik but of Nikola Kalinic and Mauro Icardi over the summer. But rather than feel sorry for himself, Sarri got creative and reinvented Mertens as a False Nine.
“Dries never made the most of his huge potential [in front of goal] in the past,” Sarri explained on Sky Italia. “He has got to convince himself he’s a world beater.” To help him do that, the team also has to play to his strengths. “They’ve got to give me the ball to feet,” Mertens insists. It’s useless to expect someone who is 5’5” tall to beat most Serie A defenders in the air. Mertens isn’t the type of player who can play with his back to goal and engage in physical battles with centre-backs either. “With respect to Milik we do miss the more classic No.9 who can hold the ball up and help the team push up,” Sarri conceded. That was evident away at Juventus. "With Dries we play quick combinations. We get the wide players closer to him. We try and counter quicker.”
A return of 14 goals in all competitions, of which nine have come in Mertens’ 8 games as a striker, has got fans wondering what will happen when Milik comes back in the New Year. Mertens is expected to reprise his role on the left, which is a shame, although what the last couple of months have done is force Sarri to find a Plan B that could prove very useful going forward. A Plan C looks to be arriving in January too. Napoli have agreed terms with Genoa for Leonardo Pavoletti. All that is left for him to do is pass a medical and the deal is done.
Pavoletti represents a better fit than Gabbiadini as Milik's stand-in and, as such, would be a welcome addition. However, some are questioning whether the move is necessary now Mertens has emerged as such a potent goal threat. My counter to that would be to remember your gut instinct when Milik got hurt in October. It felt at the time like Napoli were short in a key position and were it not for Sarri’s ability to conjure a rabbit out of hat they perhaps wouldn't be back in contention for a place on the podium in Serie A. While opinions on what Napoli need haven’t changed, what has done in the meantime is our appreciation of Mertens. There is nothing ‘False’ about him as a No.9. He is what Italians call a punta vera: a true striker.
