That’s a pen

Here we go

Now we are definitely just playing for the draw and praying that time passes fast. That’s not good.

This thread comes with a perfect timing, today we (Mantova) are playing as leaders of a professional league for the first time since 2006!

On Tuesday we took the leadership after beating third-placed Pro Vercelli. We were starting with 7 reserves and despite that it was probably our best match I have ever attended. I had already seen something very good in the previous games, but this one was really impressive for a third division side.Our coach is a former assistant of De Zerbi, so the style of play is more or less that one, but I wasn’t expecting it to work so well in Serie C: instead, we always manage to dominate possession and we actually play beautifully at times (compared to the average quality of Serie C, of course).

We might even lose the lead today (we play the new third-placed team away) but I don’t care, five months ago I witnessed us getting relegated to Serie D after a truly atrocious performance. Then we have been readmitted, ownership changed (we were previously “multi-owned” by Verona’s owner) and there is finally a long-term project (clearly aimed at promotion in 3-4 years) with a serious owner. For this year that’s already enough.

We are definitely not favourites for promotion, so I’m just enjoying the moment while it lasts, while keeping an eye on the advantage over the relegation play-outs (which is currently 13 points) and counting the points we still need to be reasonably sure to be safe: last year 46 points were needed to avoid the play-outs, we’re already at 23 so we need 23 more. Personally I postpone any other consideration to when we’ll reach 46 points.