Player Focus: How good is Rodigo Palacio at home at Inter Milan?

Player Focus: Rodrigo Palacio at home at Inter

As he drove through the gates at Inter’s Appiano Gentile training ground for the first time, Rodrigo Palacio must have felt a sense of trepidation, not because of the history about the place but for fear that his new captain Javier Zanetti would be waiting for him with a pair of scissors.

“Palacio is a great champion,” Pupi jokingly told the Inter Channel after it emerged that an agreement had been reached to sign him from Genoa for €10.5m a year ago. “Once he gets here I’d like to cut off his ponytail so he’s bald like Cambiasso.”

Ponytail? More like a rat’s tail. Mind you, don’t say that to Palacio. He’s very protective of it. Nicknamed La Trenza – The Tress – it’s part of his identity. Asked how he’d react if Zanetti tried to cut it off, Palacio playfully replied: “I’d kill him.”

He’d allowed Genoa to take a 7cm strand for their museum. Over the previous three years, Palacio had scored more goals in Serie A than any other South American to play for Italy’s oldest club, including Carlos Alberto Aguilera, Juan Carlos Verdeal and Diego Milito. Genoa had wanted a memento to remember him by and what better than a piece of his plait.

They’d miss Palacio. The 19 goals he got in the league that year had saved them from relegation. And so after resisting a transfer to Inter the previous summer despite the prospect of a reunion with his former coach at Genoa, Gian Piero Gasperini, he felt it was time to move on. The fans who spat at him after a 1-1 draw in Novara had made his mind up for him. And so Palacio followed in the footsteps of Milito, his compatriot.

Like him, he was joining Inter from Genoa at 30. He settled in fast. Palacio was the latest member of “il clan degli Argentini.” At the time there were eight at Inter. He got lifts into training with Milito, roomed with his former teammate at Boca Juniors, Matias Silvestre, drank the yerba mate prepared by Walter Samuel – incidentally no one else is allowed to make it at Inter – and went to the many barbecues they organised.

Inter felt like home and what’s more Palacio believed the opportunity to play for an elite European club had come at exactly the right moment in his career too. “I couldn’t have hoped for better,” Palacio told La Gazzetta dello Sport. “My big chance came when I was in full maturity.”

By the time he made it to San Siro, he knew his own game inside out. “Now I have more experience. I play in a calmer manner.” Keeping things simple and doing the simple things well, Palacio claims, is the essence of his game. And yet throughout his time in Italy he has scored some mind-bogglingly difficult goals like the back-heel from a corner for Genoa against Lazio on his 30th birthday.

His first season at Inter ended with him as the club’s top scorer in all competitions with 22 goals. The highlight, one of few over a campaign that started so well and finished with the team down in 9th and out of Europe for the first time since 1999, was the 3-1 win in Turin that ended Juventus’ 49-match unbeaten run in the league. Palacio scored that night. His best goal, however, came against Bologna in the Coppa Italia when he ran from just inside his own half and curled a shot into the top corner from outside the box.

A second striker, he had to learn how to lead the line after Milito suffered a horrible season-ending injury shortly after the winter transfer window closed. Few thought he could do it but he did, and very well indeed, at least until he tore a muscle and missed a significant number of games in the final stretch of what was a cursed campaign.

In Milito’s absence, Palacio has become Inter’s go-to goalscorer in 2013 and he’s had to, for no sooner had his friend made his comeback than he was back in the treatment room again. Sure, there’s Mauro Icardi [who incidentally has just undergone surgery] and Ishak Belfodil [suspended] but both are seen as the future of Inter’s forward line rather than guaranteed starters at present. Remember, trusting in youth is not Walter Mazzarri’s forte.

So what we’ve seen from Inter so far this season is a kind of 3-5-1-1-0. A formation without an orthodox centre-forward. How then should Palacio’s role be described? Is he a false nine? “I’d say that I’m still a second striker, but that I also like playing like this: as a false forward and not a classic No.9. I like it because I tire myself out less and being closer to goal I get to score more.”

Palacio has found the net seven times in Serie A this season and, with four assists to his name, has been involved in as many goals as the league’s top scorer Giuseppe Rossi [11]. Of the Argentines in Serie A, Juventus’ Carlos Tevez and Napoli’s Gonzalo Higuain have grabbed more headlines. They’re the bigger names. Still the lower profile Palacio has been more decisive so far this season.

At 33%, he has the best conversion rate of all strikers in Serie A in 2013-14. Mazzarri knows how to make strikers tick. In return he expects them to work when out of possession too and with Palacio it’s no different. “If we lose the ball, we have to get it back as quickly as possible by going and pressing whoever has stolen it from us.” This is evident in his play. Among the other forwards in Serie A this season only Tevez has made more tackles [18] than Palacio [15].

He merits wider recognition. This is someone who has put in the hard yards. “If you’d asked me when I was playing in Bella Vista [back in Argentina] I would never have imagined going so far in football,” he told El Grafico. “I started at the very bottom playing in a local league, the Argentine second division and then Huracan. I had to fight. I went step-by-step, division by division. No one who knew me thought I could play in Europe.” But he did.

Palacio is still of the opinion that he played his best football in Argentina. He was a member of the Boca side that won the Copa Libertadores in 2007 and managed to get himself on the scoresheet in the Intercontinental Cup final against Milan, eluding Paolo Maldini and Alessandro Nesta. “I was quicker, more effective in my dribbling. I loved to set my teammates up. Now I try to get in the area more, I try to score goals more.” That’s what Inter need him to do and he hasn’t disappointed.

A new contract is being drawn up, according to Il Corriere della Sera, and you’d have to say that on the back of the last year, Rodrigol has earned it.