Odds and Ends

By: salvatore | March 25th, 2008

Six Lazio players have been called up to their respective national teams this week, and potentially, all of them will miss out on Saturday’s meeting with battered and bruised South American giants Inter Milan. What this means is that despite our relative good form in the last four or five matches, there’s a chance we’ll take on the league leaders without Goran Pandev, Aleksander Kolarov, Gaby Mudingayi, David Rozehnal, Loranzo De Silvestri and Valon Behrami. In case you’re wondering, that would pretty much suck ass on a donkey.

donkey ass

Here’s hoping I’m completely wrong, and they’re all fit, ready and able this weekend (De Silvestri doesn’t have much of an excuse, I don’t think he played today for the U-21).

Stefan Radu was also supposed to be called up by Romania this week, but the same injury that’s kept him out of the last two Lazio games has ruled him out. That, thankfully, hasn’t stopped Lotito from talking “Riscatto“. If you’ll recall, Radu joined the team on loan from Dinamo Bucureşti, so his transfer isn’t final yet. Apparently, it’s going to cost our free-spending (sigh) president a total of 3.8 million euros to make Radu’s move to Rome complete, which I happen to think is something of a bargain. What Lotito thinks is anyone’s guess, but it seems like he’s going to take care of this pretty quickly.

Speaking of contracts and transfers, there was more talk this week about Valon’s uncertain future. The rumour floated on Monday was that the Swiss international could be part of a swap deal (sounds dirty already) between Lazio and Fiorentina for defender Alessandro Potenza.

Power

Aside from his kick ass name and his past ties with Inter, I don’t know all that much about Potenza (figuratively and literally). He might be a nice addition, but I don’t like the idea of parting with an important member of the team (Behrami) for another defender. How many goddamn stoppers do we need on this squadra, anyway?

We’ll just have to wait for the summer’s silly season to see what happens.

In the meantime, congrats to Kolarov on his first international call-up (and continued improvement). Keep it up Alex.

Here’s the first video comp I’ve ever found on the “New Sinisa”: