Twenty years without Piana's goals
Rome has spent two decades arguing about who was to blame for the day Roberto Piana stopped scoring, and the argument has never once been settled.
What was at stake, all those years ago, was nothing less than the last of him. Every season has an ending; only some endings take a whole city with them. When 2043/44 closed, Roberto Piana closed with it, and Roma have been living in the afterwards ever since.
The numbers are the ones they still recite: 776 club games, 397 club goals, 115 assists, a career that ran from 2022/23 to 2043/44. Roma took nearly all of it — 758 games and 390 goals — with a handful of games elsewhere at Pescara and at Yellow Red KV Mechelen that now look like footnotes to a life. Sixty-three caps and 23 goals for the national team sit alongside, and no one in the Curva has ever needed reminding of them.
Two decades on, the temptation is to turn him into a statue and forget what he actually was: a centre-forward who made the difficult thing look like the only thing worth doing. He did not decorate games. He decided them, then walked off as if deciding them had cost him nothing.
"You knew where he would be," one old teammate said this week, and shrugged. "Knowing was no help. He was there anyway."
That is the trouble with a legend of this size in a city this devoted. Roma are rebuilding under Dan Cotterill, twelfth last season, books in the red, and every striker who misses a chance hears the same name from the stands. It is unfair and it is inevitable. You do not replace a man who scored 390 goals for you. You wait, and you argue, and you remember.
Twenty years. The goals still rattle around Rome, and Roma still have not found the net he left behind.