Como's First Champions League Night, and the Coach Who Wants It to Feel Like Any Other Game
Cesc Fabregas has urged his Como squad to keep their heads ahead of the club's maiden Champions League fixture. The lake-side club's rapid rise from Serie B makes that easier said than done.
Como's First Champions League Night, and the Coach Who Wants It to Feel Like Any Other Game
The instruction, delivered the way Cesc Fabregas tends to deliver these things — softly, with a half-smile that doesn't quite reach the question — was the one he always reaches for. Treat it like any other game. Don't get caught in the lights. Walk out, do the work, walk back in.
It is, by now, a familiar Fabregas register. The 38-year-old has built a coaching identity on the unfashionable idea that a football match is a football match, however bright the stage gets. With Como preparing to play their first ever Champions League fixture, he has reached for the same quiet note.
"Cesc Fabregas, head coach of Como, has spoken ahead of the club's maiden Champions League appearance, urging his players not to be overwhelmed by the occasion," according to a report in the newsroom. "The Spanish coach emphasized a calm, business-as-usual mentality, a hallmark of his coaching philosophy." The match, the report added, "represents a milestone for the lake-side club, who have climbed from Serie B to European competition in a short period."
The words are easy to write down. They are, in fact, harder to live by — particularly when the team stepping onto the pitch is Como, a club that, until very recently, was still looking up at Italian football from the floor below it.
A club that learned to climb
Como's story has been told, in pieces, for the better part of two seasons. A modest lake-side club, founded in 1907, returned to Serie A and have, in the words of the same report, "enjoyed a remarkable rise under Fabregas." They have done it quickly, with intention, and with a coach whose own path through the game — from the Barcelona academy, through the Premier League, through some of the biggest nights the Champions League has staged, into the unglamorous later years of a playing career, and then a first proper job in the dugout — has given the project a particular kind of pull.
That pull has not been invisible. The squad at Como, put together over the past two seasons, has a different look to the one that was playing in Serie B. The young Italians in it have had the kind of seasoning that comes from being asked to play, week after week, against the better sides in Serie A — and to lose some of those weeks, too, without the season collapsing around them.
