Can Frosinone Afford Their Best Centre-Backs Together?
Frosinone have lost none of the seven Serie A games in which their two veteran centre-backs have been split, and none of the six in which they have played as a pair have been won.
Thirteen games, twenty points, sixth place. Frosinone's season is running at 1.54 points a game, a rate that would have finished comfortably in the European places in most recent campaigns and sits oddly beside a squad the table's small print keeps calling twentieth. The interesting variance is not in the points. It is in the teamsheet.
Split the season by one selection and the numbers do something close to a clean break. Carlo Alberto Scarcella and Emanuele Roberto, both 29, both centre-backs, have started together six times. Those six games have produced one win, two draws and three defeats: 1.7 goals scored a game, 1.8 conceded. The other seven games, with one of the pair missing, have produced four wins and three draws: 1.6 scored, 0.4 conceded. Same team, same shirt, same division. A defence that leaks nearly two a game becomes one that leaks less than half.
The attacking line barely moves. Frosinone score 1.7 with the pair and 1.6 without, a difference small enough to be noise. Everything that separates the two versions of the season is happening in front of the goalkeeper, and the without-one sample is unbeaten: seven matches, no losses, no asterisk.
That is the awkward part. Scarcella has been at the club since he came through its youth intake in April 2050, 366 appearances and two goals, one shirt for fourteen seasons. Roberto has been everywhere — Cesena, Fiorentina, a return to Frosinone in July 2061, a spell at Stade Brestois 29 — and arrived the second time without a club behind him. They are the two most experienced defenders on the staff, and the evidence says they are at their best apart.
None of this is a crisis. Sixth is sixth, and the unbeaten run that carried the club into late November was built largely in the seven games without the pair intact. Franco Epifani's hat-trick against Roma and Tatsuya Ishii's part in the 4-4 with Napoli came inside that stretch, when the back line was shuffled and the scoreboard kept moving anyway. Paul Jaklitsch's arrival from Fortuna Sittard in August gave the coach another body to shuffle with.
What the split does is hand Matteo Colli a weekly question with a numerical answer. Play both and the team draws and loses; play one and it does neither. Six games is a small sample, and a coach will say so. Seven games is also a small sample, and the table says so louder: thirteen matches, one defeat-free configuration, zero defeats in it.
"We are just taking it game by game," Colli said after the weekend, and the arithmetic agrees with him more than he might like. The next fixture will add either a seventh game to one column or an eighth to the other. Frosinone's season, sixth and rising, is being decided less by who they play than by which of two 29-year-olds is standing next to the other.
A partnership of 366 club games and a defence that concedes 0.4 a game when it is broken up. The ratio that matters at Frosinone this week is not points per game. It is 1.8 against 0.4, and which number the teamsheet chooses.